I’m currently reading a book entitled We by Yevgeny Zamyatin. The book describes a dystopian future similar to that of Orwell’s 1984. In actuality, Orwell drew most of his inspiration for 1984 from this book by Yevgeny Zamyatin. I’m going to refer to the author of this book from now on as simply YZ, since typing out the romanized version of his cyrillic russian name is, quite simply, ridiculous. Anyway, this book was “published” in 1920 or 1921, I can’t remember which, but it was during the time when the communist ideals and the marxist government systems were gaining popularity and power. This work seems to be a satirization of the mechanization of man YZ sees the communist party attempting to accomplish. He looked at Henry Ford’s factory assembly lines for cars, and realized that they were a heavy influence on the minds of the communist party leaders. Those who wanted the society to work together and to become something other than humans, those who wanted the society to become machines.

The story is told through the main character’s seemingly journal-like entries. He records these because he is the builder of a spaceship which is supposed to send media and material supporting and explaining the views of their state and the extreme level of efficiency they have achieved and what sorts of things they need to do in order to achieve this. The main character, D-503, sees the world through a series of equations. Almost everything he thinks of has to do with the math behind it. When he is invited by a person to come to an auditorium, he looks at the mathematical probability of being asked to that specific auditorium by that specific individual. Everything to D-503 seems to be an equation.

Right towards the very beginning of the book, he looks at the sky and sees that it is clear. He thinks this is a thing of beauty because it has no clouds that make it mathematically imperfect. He thinks the love of clouds by his ancestors was incredibly silly, why should one be interested in suspended water vapor?

YZ very obviously does not actually share this view, and embraces and promotes this view to the extreme in this book in order to satirize the direction in which he thought his society and country were going. It is plain from some of his other works that he does not actually support this view, and looks at those automatic human beings as dead and not alive.
“It is an error to divide people into the living and the dead: there are people who are dead-alive, and people who are alive-alive. The dead-alive also write, walk, speak, act. But they make no mistakes, and they produce only dead things. The alive-alive are constantly in error, in search, in questions, in torment.”

I really like the views put forward in this book, and I am only a few chapters into it, but it has gotten me thinking if our society isn’t so much like the dystopian society of the book. I feel that our society has a need to quantify everything, to force everything down into simplified expressions and equations. To make formulas for success. Efficiency seems to be the most highly revered ideal, and entropy, the most feared and loathed force in the universe. We are constantly attempting to rearrange our surroundings. We want to take the random groves of trees in the forest, cut them up to our specifications, and then build houses from them. Houses which were made from plans drawn up from architects. Architects, who were no doubt students at one point in time, and were told which the most efficent buildings are. What shapes need to be put together. What materials should be used for waterproofing and what angles work best to keep the house cool in the summer and warm in the winter. What types of designs make the best use of limited space in a city; what designs make the best use of cheap materials in the rural areas.

Architects who believe X1 + X2 + X3 = A good house, where X1, X2, and X3 are things such as money saved on heating, ease of obtaining the materials required, and price, among a good number of other things. These architects take this equation and turn it into different equations and schematics. The entire thing is a fight against the process of entropy.

Perhaps that last example wasn’t necessarily the best. I am not an architect, so I can only guess as to what things seem to govern most architects. I have developed my knowledge of architecture almost exclusively from that famous work of Ayn Rand’s, The Fountainhead.

I find other things in the life I currently live similarly formulaic, however. In school, we’re given a set of guidelines and rewarded a GPA at the end. Assuming every student is given the same mental faculties, we’re given an equation such which seems to be:

hours spent studying + accuracy of notes taken in class + attendance = GPA

 

We’re given these types of equations all of the time. Almost everything in our daily lives can be resolved down to equations that somebody or another taught us. Susceptibility to tooth decay = sweets eaten - (brushing + flossing). Even when we do the simplest actions such as tying our shoes, we follow a strict set of steps which has been given to us and handed down as knowledge from our parents and our grandparents. It’s yet another algorithm, a set of steps in order to make sure that your shoe does not fall off. Take the two strings, cross them, tuck one string under the other, pull tight, take one string and fold in half, wrap the other string around the midsection, pull through. It’s a set of steps that we’re given and we follow mindlessly, not realizing that it’s an algorithm. Not realizing that it’s programmed into our systems. We do these kinds of things each day.

 

Organized religion is another thing that seems to me to be another set of equations, another set of steps to meet an end. A procedural method for saving your eternal soul. It seems to me that modern Christianity has also fallen victim to this set of steps, to these rituals and these predefined steps which must be taken in order to become a Christian. Even as an evangelistic tool, the current-day church hands out a booklet entitled The Four Spiritual Laws, which outlines a procedure which, when followed through correctly seemingly equals spiritual salvation. The equation is something like this:

Believe in God

Believe in Jesus

Pray to Jesus to forgive your sins

Have faith that Jesus will forgive your sins

Go to church

Perform actions and deeds which show that you are indeed a Christian

Behave in the way that Christians behave

 

While I don’t disagree with all of it, I think that spirituality and having a relationship with God and with your soul is a lot more than a set of steps. People in Christian circles are always asking “are you saved?” “are you a believer?”. If the answer to this is “I have prayed to become a Christian,” then it’s accepted and taken for granted that you are a Christian. It’s also accepted that once you become a Christian, it’s not really possible for you to ever not become a Christian, and that if you stop exhibiting the behaviors of a Christian, that you were never really saved in the first place.

 

This is confusing to a lot of people because they are taught that if they say the prayer that they are saved. Unfortunately Christianity cannot be curtailed or codified into an equation as simple as the one that the church has to offer. It’s not that the Bible and the message of salvation aren’t true, it’s that they cannot be truncated into something as simple as a four-page booklet and a five minute speech given at a bus stop at 9:24 p.m. at the bus stop at the Allen Street Gate.

 

Our society seems to live by equations. We live by the bus schedules. I know that I personally seem to run my life around the bus schedules. It’s an extremely simple if-then statement.

 

IF(I get to the bus stop before one of the times listed on the bus schedule) THEN

I will get on the bus and I will make it to campus on time

ELSE

I am out of luck and I should probably start walking

END IF

 

Quizzes and tests are other examples of this sort of pervading mathematical mentality. These exemplify the biggest lie and fallacy that the schools teach children, and that is the falsehood that performance can be measured numerically. The falsity that the answers provided to a set of trivial questions listed on a sheet of paper can accurately reflect the performance of any individual. This formula is spread all throughout our society, and I think that you or I would be hard-pressed to find someone who has no experience with this system. Unfortunately, this system, as is the system of the Four Spiritual Laws and simplified evangelistic Christianity is one again completely invalid. The formulas and requirements for meeting these kinds of goals do not and cannot actually capture the soul of a man or the extent of his knowledge and expertise.

 

An interesting development is that it seems that teachers and professors are learning more and more that this rote memorized learning of tests and quizzes isn’t accurate. They have attempted to discard the old algorithm for academic success and are attempting to implement a newer one. This algorithm is called “Problem Based Learning.” This algorithm, PBL, for short is definitely an algorithm. It appears on the outside to be something new, something free. Students working on projects. Since you take out the completely obvious formulaic elements of the old system, then the new system must not be formulaic, and must encourage more freedom and flexibility.

 

Unfortunately just because an algorithm is different does not mean that it is not an algorithm. And if an algorithm cannot be applied to solve something, then changing the algorithm and deluding ourselves into the belief that it is not an algorithm isn’t going to actually help. I remember my CAS 100B class and the presentations we were given on “PMOPS”. PMOPS is the Procedural Model for Problem Solving. It is how to solve problem-based learning questions. It was a list of step by step instructions of things to do and steps to take in order to accomplish a goal. This to me is a clearly defined set of instructions, or, algorithm. It had a list of things for a group or individual to do in order to tackle the problem. It leaves the student to significantly freer use of his resources in order to accomplish the tasks set aside for him, and I think that it is better suited to achieve the needs of our current-day students, but I do not feel that it is completely right. I do not believe that it will work.

 

Those that are dead-alive do not make errors. They are completely procedural. They follow instructions given and do not make mistakes. Those people are the people who our society and our schools and our religious institutions make. They produce only dead things. Those who are alive-alive produce living things. Unfortunately it seems that there are fewer and fewer of us left.