Best of TAD, Our tower of Babel: the Media High-Rise
J.G. Ballard's unintentional allegory of our cultural squalor
I have been travelling this last week, so please enjoy this “best of” essay published before so many of you subscribed. And now that Substack Notes has arrived, well…
And the Lord said, “Behold, they are one people, and they have all one language, and this is only the beginning of what they will do. And nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them. - Genesis 11:6-7
We all speak one language now, the instant one, the one without contemplation. If we accept the premise of “natural selection,” that is the notion that some creatures possess traits beneficial or harmful to their survival upon an environmental challenge, then we must accept that all of us may not survive (or prosper in) the frenetic media tower we have built. Others will seemingly thrive there.
From J.G. Ballard’s High-Rise:
A new social type was being created by the apartment building, a cool, unemotional personality impervious to the psychological pressures of high-rise life, with minimal needs for privacy, who thrived like an advanced species of machine in the neutral atmosphere. This was the sort of resident who was content to do nothing but sit in his over-priced apartment, watch television with the sound turned down, and wait for his neighbours to make a mistake.
Today, High-Rise is an allegory. The 40-story building in the novel is a metaphor for the media tower that cycles us through its bowels and back to its lobby. Clearly, Ballard did not mean to write an allegory, he meant to examine, as was his habit, human reactions to technology and urban settings that are alien to our natural history. His characters act in implausible ways for the setting and time. Their behavior is more like our own.
Ballard’s novel is set in a luxurious high-rise apartment building that offers its occupants all the amenities they need other than jobs. They still have to leave the building for that (in 1975). He explores the residents psychosis through three main characters, each one from a different social class and different floor: the lower, middle, and upper, which correspond to their class. There are no working class residents; everyone is an educated professional. And godless.
Soon after the building is full, the people degenerate into feuding tribes. At first, the tribes are based on social class. They tolerate each other during the day in neutral areas like the supermarket and restaurant. At night, they rob, vandalize, assault, and later kill each other. The building itself, its amenities and design, causes these middle to upper class people to degenerate into murderous squalor.
The trouble is Ballard had no historical precedent for such behavior. Nothing like that ever happened even in the worst public housing projects or rent controlled high-rises in the 1960s or ‘70s. Sure, those places were depressing, crime-ridden, stink-holes but the people in them never descended into the madness imagined by Ballard. Ah, but Ballard’s people were not lower class, how would they behave? Would these over-diploma’d, wealthy and ambitious people act savagely if isolated with all their needs met? Ballard wrote an unsettling tale, but implausible, even for 1975, only two years before the infamous New York city black-out made the book seem prophetic.
Ballard had to have known this, so he made his building so vast, so alien to the human experience that man’s natural history offered no remedy. Thus the residents react schizophrenically, with fragmented emotions and normal motives askew. And yet, the worse things get the more the characters do not want to leave the building, afraid they may miss something, or afraid to confront the boring “normal.” An alien environment creates an alien response. Not everyone can survive, only the “new social type” has a chance.
Ballard’s high-rise is a metaphor for the omnipresent media tower caging and addicting the culture. Ballard quickly introduces characters who can survive this metaphoric building and they who are most responsible for the growing hostility, those “quiet and self-contained residents…” Several characters try to stem the tide against the new social type:
Sadly, they had little chance of success, precisely because their opponents were people who were content with their lives in the high-rise, who felt no particular objection to an impersonal steel and concrete landscape, no qualms about the invasion of their privacy by government agencies and data-processing organizations, and if anything welcomed these invisible intrusions, using them for their own purposes. These people were the first to master a new kind of late twentieth-century life. They thrived on the rapid turnover of acquaintances, the lack of involvement with others, and the total self-sufficiency of lives which needing nothing, were never disappointed.
Got the heebie-jeebies, yet? The high-rise offers something more to the new social type: a lack of accountability. Notably, the residents are also godless. Ballard only uses the word, “God” four times in the book, and all in dialog. The residents have no church, no prayer, no pleas to a higher power as their lives decay. Surely Ballard knew that throwing them such a lifeline would affect the narrative. Instead, he makes them revel in the degeneration, eager to plan the daily battles, avoiding all authorities and intentionally defiling and sabotaging their building.
The more arid and affectless life became in the high-rise, the greater the possibilities it offered. By its very efficiency, the high-rise took over the task of maintaining the social structure that supported them all. For the first time it removed the need to repress every kind of anti-social behavior, and left them free to explore any deviant or wayward impulses.
To enjoy their depredations more, the residents take to filming all the violence, rape and vandalism with movie cameras and Polaroids. They watch and share the movies and photos later, reliving the moments at drunken parties.
Aristotle’s says in his Ethics there are three types of life: the hedonistic, or pleasure-seeking life, the political life (with honor as the ultimate goal) and the contemplative life. Ballard’s residents pursue hedonism for a while, but then degenerate so far they no longer regard filth and starvation as displeasure. How well do we feel after hours of doom-scrolling and rage-watching? What exactly do we pursue? Certainly not pleasure. Do we pursue the political life whereby we are assured of constant affirmation? Where is the “complete life?” Is there a fourth type of life now, one of displeasure, dishonor and un-contemplation?
Explore the comment section of any news story and one will see the hair-trigger nature of the political life. Aristotle says “men seem to pursue honor in order that they may be assured of their goodness,” and that an affirmation of simple virtue “seems actually compatible with being asleep… with the greatest sufferings and misfortunes, … but a man who was living so no one would call happy…”
Below is a very tame and almost random screen-shot of comments from the Wall Street Journal: Reagan’s Lessons in Economic Leadership by Phil Gramm.
The ad hominem attack is nothing new. What is striking, however is that the Gramm’s uncontroversial encomium had over 300 comments like these by the afternoon of 16 August. In 1975, very few stories in the Wall Street Journal likely caused 300 people to lick stamps and post letters. The impetuous scream has no editor and the contemplative life is not a consideration.
The instant opinion is a conceit, a vanity both cloying and repellent. We have all done it, but only in the last decade or so. Outside of public protest, citizens once had no opportunity for this indulgence; we had to write our anger or agreement on paper, PAPER for goodness sake, and mail it. But we live in a new building now, a place where we can succor any anger, view any perversion, buy any item, believe any theory and think it all, all of it, squarely empirical and reasoned: "The science says…”, “I stand with…”, “I am against…”, “My kid achieved…”
It was precisely in these areas that the most important and most interesting aspects of their lives would take place. Secure within the shell of the high-rise like passengers on board a automatically piloted airliner, they were free to behave in anyway they wished, explore the darkest corners they could find. In many ways, the high-rise was a model of all that technology had done to make possible the expression of a truly ‘free’ psychopathology.
To Ballard, technology itself enables a debauchery of the mind, unfettered by norms or faith. The high-rise residents quickly lose their courtesy: playing music into the wee hours, throwing bottles off the balconies, leaving bags of trash in the hallways. Intentionally polluting their once grand home, literally shitting in their own nest, the residents wallow in self-righteous squalor. The residents become more vicious after they organize by floor, sabotaging, raiding and vandalizing the floors above or below. No one will call the police because nothing is wrong. They are having their say, after all. The high-rise’s workers, those who clean it, fix it, sustain it, soon abandon it. In the end, the residents hide alone, barricaded and starving, trusting no one.
We have soiled a once stately, admittedly elitist, commercial media mansion with our trash and neglect. The gate-keepers, those who liked a few days to think about things or write another draft, have left the building. We are now largely alone in our trashity of the commons. Perhaps we are getting the media tower we paid for and the one we deserve. It is cheap and fast and easy.
Like the residents of the high-rise, the junkies of the babbling tower have to keep out-raiding the other tribes, out outraging the other guy's rage, upping our maintenance dose of Twitter smack to feel an ephemeral victory, coming down hard later with traced veins and needing to dunk pound cake with shiny fingers*. Will we end our days alone, barricaded in our chat rooms, cognitively obese and bulging across mounds of filth like the residents of the High-Rise?
Stephen Kent, no stranger to the darts and turds of the media tower residents, cautions against this vain addiction in his fine blog, This is the Way.
In 1975, not much in any newspaper or television newscast was undigested, un-drafted and un-edited; un-contemplated. The tower is built, it cannot be torn down. But we can stop building it higher, and stop using the instant, un-contemplative tongue. Learning another language is another way to listen with contemplation.
The Lord said,
Come, let us go down and there confuse their language, so that they may not understand one another’s speech.” 8 So the Lord dispersed them from there over the face of all the earth, and they left off building the city. 9
Vale
PS: High-Rise is also a 2015 movie. I have not seen it.
PSS: Read paper books, write drafts on a notepad and type the final version on a manual typewriter. Unwind yourself, as King Louie would say.
*Dunking pound cake: a term used in Naked Lunch, by William S. Burroughs, and an influence on J. G. Ballard’s, Atrocity Exhibition. Both books are steaming piles of nihilism. Not that I care. Ian Curtis, the long dead singer of Joy Division, the mirthless depressives of Manchester, said High-Rise was his favorite book. Poor Ian. Joy Division later became New Order. You danced to their music, you know you did. Curtis’ voice always got on my nerves, but his story is a sad one.
Atrocity Exhibition is a genius pairing with this piece, and the Ballard novel you use as a foundation.
"We are now largely alone in our trashity of the commons. Perhaps we are getting the media tower we paid for and the one we deserve. It is cheap and fast and easy."
I'm glad you brought this one out of the archive.