The Year That Never Happened
On Resets and Year Zero
Take a look at this picture:
It was taken a couple years ago in Ohio (I wish I knew who took it, or what building that was, but such information was lost by the time it got to me). A brick building was being remodeled, and as part of the process the bricks on the front were demolished.
Revealed beneath: a gorgeous stone-and-concrete building with scrollwork ornamentation and molded-in faux Doric-column friezes.
What in the hell would possess someone to cover a perfectly good (and beautiful) building with the most soul-crushing veil imaginable, and at unnecessary expense as well?
Believe it or not, it’s because of a Spanish character from the eleventh century named Alfonso, who led a pack of mercenaries to conquer the city of Toledo, where he found a library that contained the most terrifying elemental danger the human spirit has ever encountered:
Math books.
In this case, math books that used numbers that originated in India, and had been in use in Arabia for a few centuries. These numbers didn’t just work more efficiently than Roman numerals, they had a digit that the Romans never thought to invent:
The Zero.
The Magick Number
Big deal, right? Zero is just a placeholder for base-10 mathematics. 20 has a two in the tens place, and a zero in the ones place. So what?
Well, not so fast. Zero is a powerful number. As observed in Charles Seife’s marvelous volume Zero: Biography of a Dangerous Idea, the number has a strange quirk: it is at least as important to philosophy and theology as it is to mathematics.
You can, after all, do most practical mathematics (geometry, trigonometry, algebra, arithmetic, etc.) without ever touching a zero—sure, it’s cumbersome to do calculations in Roman numerals or in glyphs, but practical math in the pre-industrial world was rarely done with numerals anyway. Instead, builders, bakers, gunners, and everybody else did calculations using ratios, variables, placeholders and constants (such as π), and other workarounds; the Parthenon, the Pyramids, and most of the other wonders of the ancient and medieval Mediterranean worlds (as well as all of their commerce) was done without zero.
But in philosophy and theology, the idea of zero had a much more profound effect. It became essential to theologians and occultists for the same reason that it became important to mathematicians: it turned a previously heretical concept into something quantifiable: nothingness.
Zero Against the Gods
Previously, all religions and thought systems had little room for nothing. The ancient gods fashioned the universe out of a pre-existent something. In Mesopotamia and the Levant, it was primordial chaos. The Gnostics saw the universe and all the gods within it as successive emanations from a primordial perfection (to put it in terms that moderns are more likely to understand, everything is created out of the substance of God), and each successive generation of those emanations is a less-perfect, more-corrupt version, with material reality living at the bottom of the moral heap. The ancient (and some modern) Hindus, from whose thought Gnosticism seems to have been derived, see reality as a dream of the Brahman. In every case, the idea of creation Ex Nhilo is foreign.
Even Yahweh (the god of the Bible) doesn’t originally create out of nothing. The original Hebrew of Genesis 1:1 is properly translated:
“In the beginning, when God began to create the Heavens and the Earth, the Earth was void and without form, and the Spirit of God hovered over the waters.”
And was using these primordial waters that God wrought his creative work.
The Christians, too, saw this eternal pre-existence in the universe. The Gospel of John opens thusly:
“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things were made, and without him nothing was made that has been made.”
And, like all of these ideologies would lead you to expect, almost nobody in the ancient world actually erased the past. Conquerors appropriated the past and put their own stamp on it. Pharaohs would scratch out the names of past rivals on large monuments, sometimes substituting their own names, but left the monuments themselves intact. The Romans famously left the religions of conquered cultures intact, contenting themselves with ruling over, rather than erasing, their former rivals.
But with Zero, all that changed. It opened the possibility of void—a nothing so profound that it wasn’t just the absence of something, it was defined by the complete absence of everything; a null space. And, since all things have their opposites, it also opened the space for infinity. Now God could be (for the first time) infinite...but you also have a new unavoidable possibility in religion, something beyond deism (i.e. the creator does not intervene in the universe) and pantheism (i.e. there are no gods, but the universe itself brings life): atheism (there are no gods at all, and the universe is the business of engineers, not mystics). You also have the possibility of a God that creates, not out of himself, but out of the nothingness of the void.
And out of that nothing He has created humanity in His own image, who also, it follows, must be able to create out of nothing. Humanity thus should not feel constrained by working with the matter of the past. And, being born from nothingness, humanity is truly a blank slate, and so need not fret about the limitations of its own nature. It need not feel bound by centuries of wisdom about what makes people happy, what makes people healthy, how trust functions in a society, how a good government functions, or what it means to thrive. Instead, it is free to imagine whole new ways in which things might be.
And so it has done.
The World of Science Fiction
In the nineteen forties, writer Robert A. Heinlein coined the term “Speculative Fiction” to denote the broad church within which his own genre of science fiction was but a sect. Speculative Fiction, he said, is fiction which starts with the question:
“What if?”
What if we cold reanimate the dead? (Frankenstein)
What if men journeyed into space and found the moon populated by hyper-intelligent ants? (The First Men in the Moon)
What if the Earth were hollow, and we could find the center? (Journey to the Center of the Earth)
What if we could resurrect ourselves? (Altered Carbon, The Kiln People, The Resurrection Junket)
Such stories, when done well, are excellent thought experiments. We live in a technological world, and every major technological change causes social changes because technology re-orders power structures. Such stories allow us to explore, in advance, where such technology might take us—because as long as technological development continues, we will get taken there whether we like it or not.
Science fiction authors, after all, are generally in the business of extrapolation. We ask: “If this goes on, what will it mean?”
As a science fiction author myself, I’m an enthusiastic participant in these sorts of experiments.
Alas, science fiction is but the tamed subspecies of a wild creature that regularly soaks the land in blood.
Decades before Frankenstein was a glimmer in its author’s eye, the western world was beset by another, more profound species of speculative fiction that asked questions like:
“What if everyone is basically good, and evil is just a side-effect of society?”
“What if everyone was free and equal and united in brotherhood?”
“What if we removed the corrupting cultural legacy that makes some men subject to other men?”
“What if we controlled the way that people learn?”
“What if we could live entirely by reason, and extinguish the animal passions?”
Questions like these were asked in earnest by thinkers such as Jean-Jacques Roseau, and those who followed him naturally came to ask the question:
“Since our enemies won’t fall in line with our dream, what if we just killed them all?”
The answer returned by reality wasn’t congenial—the death toll invariably accelerated the erosion of the dreamed-for utopia—but strangely that hasn’t stopped one set of political entrepreneurs after another. When the everyman can vote, and all he really wants is to have a dependable income so he can enjoy his life and family and earn a decent social position, it’s pretty easy to get momentum for any “what if” you like, as long as you cast your enemies as standing in the way of the things the everyman values.
And so we get an endless parade of political science fictional dreamers asking questions like:
“What if we could manage cities in such a way that we completely separate families from commerce?”
“What if we outlawed farming and forced people to eat food manufactured by companies that donate to our campaigns?”
“What if we could re-make our energy system to run on sunlight and wind?”
“What if everyone was good and nobody had to have guns?”
“What if we just froze the bank accounts of people who oppose the program?”
“What if we cleaned the gene pool of Jews, or blacks, or anyone who has antisocial tendencies?”
“What if we could just print money?”
“What if we could erase the plague of humanity from the natural world?”
The Foundational “What If”
When the French Revolution overthrew the monarch, they did something new in history:
They re-set the calendar.
The Revolution was Year One. A new civilization, which did all it could to erase the past, dated all of human history to the year its regime took power. This new civilization had a new religion (the Cult of Reason) which erased the culture and mythos that came before it. And all this was needed because of the New Man—a man who had no nature. Created out of nothing, owing nothing, creating from nothing, the New Man was patient zero in a new era of human history.
The new civilization had new laws for a New Man, laws that would mold the soft clay of humanity into a great force for good in the world, so that France could then export the Revolution to the far corners of the world, bringing the gospel of Liberté, égalité, fraternité!
And then, all men would be truly free!
It would have worked, too, if it hadn’t been for those goddamn kids and their pre-wired brains and their human nature fucking it all up.
Human nature is old, and anyone who’s been around the block a few times (or even interacted with a baby) knows that there is something there, and that something is pretty damn powerful. Why on Earth would somebody want to pretend humans are something other than pretty-damn-smart animals, with all the drives and appetites and nobility and amorality that implies?
Of Genius and Vision
Not to put too fine a point on it, but life isn’t easy, and it’s especially not easy for the very intelligent among us who experience alienation from their fellows beginning with their earliest experiences. The separation of the brilliant and geeky from the normies goes back to antiquity, as does that most quintessential quality of frustrated genius:
Resentment.
How is it fair that the burly motherfucker—who swings a sword well but couldn’t balance his finances if his life depended on it—winds up ruling the country, while all the geniuses who can design intricate and beautiful systems wind up doing his accounting? Why is it that nobody can seem to recognize genius until the geniuses are dead?
History is littered with the tales of geniuses who starved while the peasants around them flourished, from grand artists like van Gogh to daring misfit thinkers like Diogenes. The geniuses who do well are only rarely rulers—most of the time, they’re the pet playthings of mafioso thugs who are trying to cloak themselves in respectability (as was the case with Da Vinci and the Medici family).
But if you could level all those hierarchies, if you could wipe the slate clean, if you could re-boot humanity, then the cream would rise to the top. The geniuses would rule, as Plato (in The Republic) so wisely said they should. All the frustrated genius need to is learn how to exploit the system, infiltrate it, and then, once he and his friends sit atop it, burn the past.
Because if you burn the past, nobody will know how to make things work...
...except you and the experts you brought with you. You will be the one in control.
But that’s not really the point, is it?
Conquest, after all, is as old as history itself. Governments roll over, power shifts, but the culture continues. If you’re going to put effort into conquering, it damn well better continue. Conquest is expensive and risky, and if you’re going to expend that kind of effort, you want a prize for your troubles.
But if all you really want is revenge...
Well, that makes everything much easier.
And you can exploit the system. Every system has cracks. You can work your way into those cracks, and swell them with others like you, and burst it at the seams, and use all that nascent power to destroy everyone and everything that ever made you feel inferior.
Then, and only then, will you really get what you’re after.
And what are you after?
Maybe you’re a woman and want to be seen as a pioneer—you could claim that it’s “about time a woman did X.” All you have to do is erase the memory of the women who went before you.
Maybe you’re a frustrated minority kid with a middling academic record—you could start knocking down the monuments to the people who freed slaves, so that you can claim credit for “ending racism and oppression.”
Maybe you’re a professor, or an administrator, or a politician, and you want to be remembered as a great figure—you could steal the words of those who came before you, and suppress their memory.
Or maybe you’re an architect and feel outclassed by the beautiful cities around you, but a big war has opened a lot of new construction opportunities. You could invent a style of perfect, sterile, square buildings and get guarantees from your friends in government that these buildings will dominate the landscape, shutting people off from their heritage and imprisoning them in a drudgery that you created.
This is why those brick facades went up over the old beautiful buildings, and why most things built anew after World War 2 are so unbearably drab and soulless. New Buildings for a New Modern Man, and there’s precious little of the past left to remind you of how beautiful things can be.
Look at this:
This is a doorknob and latch plate of the sort that was common in middle-class homes before World War Two. They were common because they were mass produced. In the pre-WW2 world, even things as small and incidental as latch plates were saturated with ornamentation, and the saturation reflected the desire to make the domesticated human world as beautiful as the natural world it replaced.
Then with post-war reconstruction came the Bauhaus and the Brutalists and the Authoritarian High Modernists and the other schools of design that sought to re-make a mold-able, blank-slate humanity into the image of the machine, so it might be more easily tamed, administered, and commanded—a Year Zero reset that would eliminate the problems of war and infighting and want and poverty, with all hierarchies leveled, and all men equal (though some would, naturally, be more equal than others, by dint of their genius).
But, of course, to do that, they and their ideological comrades had to burn down the past, all while selling the rest of us on the dream of efficiency (as if beauty can’t be efficiently reproduced, as it has been ever since the invention of the die, the block, and the printing press).
The point is not to conquer the treetops, it’s to burn down the forest and dance in the ashes.
If you start with nothing, you’re free to create anything.
Zero is a magick number.
Living in the Future
When the Gregorian Calendar was formulated in the 16th century, despite the fact that the West had known about Zero for hundreds of years, and knew about its importance on the number line, no Year Zero was included. Year One, purportedly the year of the birth of Christ, was seen as the Beginning of the Christian Era (and, theologically speaking, a new spiritual epoch). There was no Year Zero because Zero would have connoted not a new world, but a blank slate. A time before things happened. A year of infinite potential and chaos. The Christians, for all their revolutionary fervor, did not even retroactively claim that their god-man created the world anew. Like all conquerors before him, Jesus was seizing and transforming what had come before.
It wasn’t until Pol Pot, who understood better than the French the nature of his ambition, that anyone had the audacity to re-set the calendar to Year Zero.
But the desire for Year Zero comes to us with the number itself.
Since the advent of widespread literacy in the sixteenth century, the Western World has become a revolving experiment in science fiction. The wave of revolutions that kicked off when Luther fractured the Catholic church resulted in one after another Utopian social experiment and political ideology, all starting from scratch, all trying to dream-it-up-again, to create ex nihilo like the gods of old (even the Christian god) did not.
Is it any wonder, then, that, inch by inch, the world has become a place of science fiction? It seems almost a fait acompli that as the Freedom of Zero has finally settled into every bit of thinking within the incubators and halls of power, it has made the postmodern world what so many one-time aficionados of year Zero warned it would; an exemplar of that most successful of Science Fictional genres:
The dystopia.