Chapter Three: Losing the Feel for the Craft

Abstract

Things tell a story. They can unveil the direction our society is heading in. Efficient warfare epitomized by the drone simplicates violence. The ‘double tap’ technique lubricates civilian killing in the current phase when societies have become human terrain systems.

Also in the Global South, such as in the socially stressed regions of eastern and central Africa, a simplex type of magic has emerged. Why would torturing a body with albinism traits yield fortune? To infer what exactly has changed to create this belief, the chapter uses ethnographic data to weave together the social, cultural and existential dimensions of medicine. The inference is extended to simplex society at large. Both technology and witchcraft are highly overrated in such society where meaning and feeling have bifurcated, and frames disappear from view.

‘What’s that sound? The humming above. Nothing can describe the powerlessness, the hatred we feel’, Nour insists, ‘at the constant presence of that thing hovering above our heads. A state peering at us.’ Nour is a longtime friend living in Lebanon between the hills near the Israeli border.¹ ‘You run outside, shout at it. Go away! It stays or moves a little, an irritating inch, and then goes on humming.’

‘Things’ can ‘tell’ us about the direction our society is heading in. The first chapter touched on how 4WD vehicles in European towns simplicate inequality. How does contemporary technology, in this chapter epitomized by the drone, simplicate violence?

Babied

Apple. Audi. Tesla. Mars. A short name for components or ingredients scattered overseas and transported for assembly at high environmental cost. The brand name for a singular thing conceals the complex sequences of just-in-time delivery and untaxed transport routes of the free-trade global economy from which the product’s components have been cherry-picked by multinationals. The simplication of production happens at planetary scale, under the banner of shareholder satisfaction. Indirectly, you and me through our government, bank, social security, pension fund and the social contract signed at birth, are shareholders terrified by the slightest disturbance of the system. As shareholders, we do not want to change the unsustainable yet rewarding arrangement of the welfare state. Not even if the security we hope to obtain from it yields more insecurity. As shareholders of the state, we made a huge loss on the stock exchange after the Covid-19 virus caused a lockdown in China blocking containers in the harbors. ‘It takes 2300 pieces to make a Mercedes and one not to.’² Corporations prefer the complexity of calculating routes for separate components in function of a resulting fixed price. A simple choice averting fear of the unknown, they assume, is what the customer wants as opposed to the alternative of components produced in ever nearer locations, and prices varying in function of real environmental costs.³ The customer is a modern citizen, after Gluckman’s model, prepared for simplex tasks in a complex network. The complexity of interconnections is not planned. The network’s uncontrollable globalism seems inevitable. ‘Individual initiatives are proverbial drops in the ocean.’ Accordingly, many among us go on consuming unsustainably.

Companies and governments coping with dense networks of polyvocal communication replete with uncertainty want customers to act predictably and as a mass. The post-Fordist company selects truths, conceptualizes and models to simulate a grasp of the complexity surrounding, and make the simulation real in its consequences. In the era of the simplex, therefore, big data reigns. To think of humans as behaving in patterns should serve the prevention of accidents and calamities, and the increase of productivity and consumption. The lust for big data befits the latest postindustrial phase known as surveillance capitalism.⁴ What is the unit of big data? An atom of information. A mythical atom, pretending to represent.⁵ The ‘given’, data, would miraculously carry along the context it represents in a massive collection.⁶ Big data approach units of information as simplex, reducing reality to a single strand, instrumental in monitoring and steering populations. For technical procedures in genetics and pharmaceutics the number of data frequently yields spectacular results. However, in spite of the enormous investments to manage the zettabytes, big data furnish no accurate predictions of real life events, whether a sports victory or a flu outbreak.⁷ Belief in the simplex reflects the wish that life and our future be technical. The results are sobering. Critical minds of the knowledge economy have grown in number, distrusting.

A murmur of polite concern has been heard from the onset about the dark matter of decisions materialized in sophisticated activities and machines; about the market welcoming speedy information-processing unhampered by two-way communication and fickle human intuition; about production being boosted at the cost of the artisan’s customized piece⁸; about supply trailing the greatest demand, which corresponds to the common denominator (e.g., customers disliking effort and wanting instant gratification cheaply, white bread and sweet soda). A novel type of technology dehumanizes, depriving the human of control and the ‘burden’ of trust:

My first exposure to the word simplicate was in the 1950’s when a NASA engineer told my father that the test pilots were being overwhelmed with situational indicators, and increasingly complex required response sequences. This was leading to dangerously increasing error rates and reduced safety margins, so they had to ‘simplicate’ the control panels, to re-balance complex equipment failure rates against human error rates, by adding more complex interlock and sequencing circuits, and to reduce the time and motion demands on the pilots. Some pilots objected that they were being ‘babied’, and losing their ‘feel for the craft’.⁹

To be babied sums up the objective of technology marketed for the broadest possible audience so as to make the largest possible profit. The price paid is the feel for the craft. Historically accumulated wisdom vanishes in various domains of life. The privileged witness quoted above recounts a personal impression about the origins of the process. It began with a dilemma. As progress was made in various fields of science, much more information became available on engine performance and weather conditions. Was it not society’s duty to integrate the progress into the technology and make flying safer? To use all data available in the operation system, designers have to simplicate. They have to make its circuits more complex so that the use of data will be comparatively simpler. Pilots knew how to read the instruments and controls on the dashboard. They delicately pulled slides and handles across ranges about which they had built up personal experience. They acquired an intuitive feel for a particular aircraft. In simplication, engineers decide for the pilots so that warnings appear and buttons light up to direct the pilot’s response in pre-given situations. The overall goal is to reduce contingency. Through the technology, the message is continuously transmitted of our human intuition being a liability. No empirical assessment substantiates this message. Nobody demands that either. The suspicion of human liability in itself prompts the network of designers into action.

Due to automation, the job of flying a plane resembles a computer game, one airline pilot remarks on an online forum. Another pilot compares airline flying to bus driving except that the bus driver at least must stay awake and hold the wheel.¹⁰ Instead of trusting in human intuition, the technology opts to process by itself the greatest amount of information for which no human intervention is required. Mostly we will be happy about that, but in case of system failure or unforeseen challenges the machine ‘cannot compute’. It then needs the life-saving capacity of a human. The risk we run of simplication is to have pilots without the skill.

Drones

To expand its market, technological design simplicates. Profit depends on persuading unreached audiences, playing into fears or desires rendering them vulnerable to suggestion. Where no context is necessary the market booms. The biggest booming industry worldwide specializes in the pushing of buttons. Gaming is all about guiding the user through a scenario, giving the impression of limitless options. Gaming in itself is not simplex if it stays within the sphere of leisure. But what about the latest warfare which takes after gaming? The mainly violent plots of the game industry inadvertently train cohorts of teenagers on a daily basis into virtualizing real life. As long as the shift of frames is clear, the training should be welcomed. The shift got blurred a decade ago when the Pentagon committed $19 million to funding a Human Social and Cultural Behavior modeling program, geared toward forecasting human behavior by means of computational data and a software called ‘Reactive Information Propagation Planning for Lifelike Exercises’ (RIPPLE) developed for the US Army’s National Training Center.¹¹ The center trains ICT soldiers to handle the newest technologies for surveillance and remote attack.

The drone has government personnel pushing controls from remote places to sidestep face-to-face decision-making in situ. The drone does not communicate. It registers and informs HQ about what you are doing. Or it informs you there standing below on what to do. The machine cannot be questioned. Maybe it carries weapons? The drone derives its name from the sound the four little propellers make. Its vague white presence in the sky can be heard hovering overhead. Rapidly covering distance and height, its mobility is almost unlimited, and so too its capacity of targeting missiles. Notice the many features of the drone we can enumerate without having to mention the person behind the console. It’s as if that person’s presence is secondary. Drones could do their job without human mediation. Do we not want drones to decide the war in Ukraine?

Remote-controlled apparatuses have existed for decades in assemblages of varying complexity, from toy cars to little helicopters. Drones sell so well of late not because of any remarkable technological advance. Their popularity has risen with the cultural shift known as securitization. Features that previously galvanized the rare amateur have suddenly attracted the interest of professionals from the military and police, with the support of policy-makers. Some amateurs too might be (un)pleasantly surprised today to be able to own a drone with camera that can spy and pry into the neighbors’ backyard (despite adapted regulations by the Federal Aviation Administration).¹² For the military, though, an important feature is remoteness. Drones, like robots, do not put the soldier’s life at risk. Moreover, they keep the human affect of exchanged glances at bay. The person looking through the camera of the drone cannot be seen. The machine can be an excuse for violence. Hiding the glance facilitates the killing.

Why would an excuse be necessary, one may wonder. Is patriotism not enough justification to kill an enemy ‘in time of war’? The army has to take into consideration a range of liabilities to not jeopardize expensive operations. As the globe interconnects, the reasons for empathy increase. Soldiers outgrowing provincialism and making friends on the cosmopolitan internet or backpacking with the Lonely Planet in their hand discover the artificial nature of national borders. Will army generals put the weighing of life-or-death decisions in the hands of cosmopolitans, who on both sides meet and converse in English? Military technology ensures that as little as possible ethical context interferes between detecting a target and eliminating it. Drones are the answer for actions whose execution should not depend on unpredictable communication between striker and target. The technology avoids the affective communication whereby a human striker leaves the expected sphere of exchange, in casu warfare, and links up with the existential issue of life and death. The striker and the target originate from distinct spheres, yet just like the explorer in the Amazon forest briefly crossing paths with the animist hunter, they share life, the source of production. That is the other side of the globalist monster we let grow. Because of the ambiguity of globalization and hyper-connectivity, humans more than ever have reason to care about each other. The harm can persist after disconnecting feeling from meaning. The drone prepares the transition.

Contemporary technologies simplicate in that they accomplish a reduction of complexity for ease of use. They impose a simplex, the unidimensional ‘ally vs. enemy’ which a world citizen must reject. Technology makes the decision for humans so they close off their feelings from the communicative flow. Despite (or because of) the scientific and technological advance of the information society, the ethics of warfare have evolved in a perplexing direction. Combat these days is nocturnal, sometimes urban and mostly erratic in response to the insurgents’ attacks, but the newest technologies of allied warfare dehumanize the interventions, thus reinforce the insecurity they are meant to combat. As technologies ‘virtualize’ human targets, civilian casualties increase. Drones make decisions about life and death less real, but they kill 50 civilians per insurgent.¹³ Going by the rate of human collateral damage, ‘the war on terror’ re-designated by the US administration as ‘overseas contingent operations’ was indeed contingent, as in subject to pure chance.

Drones have become part of warfare in its latest phase called securitization. The ‘war on terror’ implemented disproportionate measures to prevent another 9/11 from happening. Civilians became matters of security and monitoring.¹⁴ The advertised goal was to pre-empt unrest in the home region of the attackers. The battlefield separating demarcated sides has been replaced by a dispersed and mixed civilian-military terrain. Through army operations in the Middle East the evolution of warfare has come full circle. The face-to-face combat of the First World War was succeeded in the Second World War by battlefields of largely faceless mobile artillery. The Gulf War introduced stealth and had near-zero allied casualties. The war in Iraq returned to proximity-killing, but with a twist. The face-to-face combat was mediated by images that dehumanize the victim.¹⁵ Night-vision goggles overlaying perception with green-lit squares, digits and directive codes nowadays do much of the detecting at close range for soldiers wearing the goggles during their invasions of civilian houses suspected of holding terrorists. The same objective of avoiding face-to-face contact is attained by armored vehicles making roadside kills. Together with drones steered remotely from behind a pc, the newest war technologies form the sensory equipment to simplicate the weighing of life or death. The simplex ‘civilians want efficiency so drones do the killing’ covers up an alternative perspective recombining the four meanings: ‘drones efficiently kill civilians.’ The tensor in Fig. 1 pictures the relation between the two frames in the sphere of warfare.

Fig. 1

Simplex and tensor of drone warfare

The screen of the pc to operate the drone displays boxes. Tick off ‘double tap’ and the drone will strike twice on the same spot. In between those two rapidly succeeding moments the drone’s operator cannot reacquire sight of the area. The fired bomb attracts rescuers including adults that were targeted but missed by the strike. The second bomb kills them in the cloud of dust. Of course, nothing guarantees that rescuers and mourners will be attracted by the first bomb. Moreover, the second strike is automatic instead of an observation-based decision, so in letter the double tap does not violate the army ethic of avoiding civilian casualties. Several US drone strikes killing civilians in this way have been reported among others in Yemen between 2012 and 2014.¹⁶ How could this lethal automation have been initiated under the administration of Barack Obama, whose foreign policy treaded lightly in Democrat fashion?

The double tap originally was an accepted shooting technique for guns. Its purpose was to improve accuracy because the gun barrel fully extends only in the second shot. That condition of use, an ‘if’, lacks in the drone’s double strike. The second bomb will not hit the target ‘more’ accurately. The double tap exemplifies the simplex for skipping the communication of context and replacing the original purpose of the technique. In letter, the double tap refers to an accepted technique. In spirit, which requires insight in a technology’s frame, it lubricates civilian killing. To decontextualize the flow of information is to accelerate the flow and facilitate an expectedly difficult implementation. Also in bureaucratic decisions forbidding the ‘dual use’ (military and civilian use) of necessities for a population under siege, we capture the spirit of the simplex (see “Chapter Five: Simplex Communication Society”).

In the sphere of combat, the contexts of enemy battalions resemble each other. After battle, peace talks are possible. However, the evolution in warfare we noted above points to a widening gap between meaning and feeling, to cultural essentialism and to obstructed feelings of affinity across cultures. Simplexes speed up entropy in society. With uprooted meanings turned into disconnected essences, the cultural basis is lacking for frameshift and a common sphere of exchange, concretely: peace talks ending war. The context of a drone strike is not similar to that of a terrorist attack. Both are acts of violence with civilian casualties in the same conflict, but the actors’ frames differ fundamentally qua sphere. The insurgent challenges Western hegemony incarnated by the twin towers. The counter-insurgent forestalls the threat of destabilizing the status quo. The objective of the so-called Af-Pac wars in the Swat valley is not a duel with winners and losers. Army generals did not hope for Taliban warriors to give proof of respect for democracy and women’s rights to subsequently see the bearded men in kaftan vacate their shelters brandishing a white flag. Nobody counted on the Taliban’s alterity vanishing, or had a scenario ready for the war ending. To know why, we must consider a Western view on society’s sources of production. The West managed to divide up life.

Geopolitical talk by the US military reduces Muslim communities to foreign ‘human terrain systems’. The simplex has attracted some unscrupulous anthropologists hired by the US government’s intelligence agencies to dish up cultural ‘information’ applicable by the army.¹⁷ The ‘human terrain system’ simplicates cultural perspectives into inimical essences. They make sure that the essentialist definition of culture does not rebound on the Western forces, who are credited as being cultureless, or immune to perspectival bias. The publication of soldier reports from the wars confirm the attitude of coalition forces toward the local population. The geographical locations of ‘significant actions’ in war are roadsides.¹⁸ References to culture, which dramatically increased in soldier reports since 2007, are invariably of the essentialist kind: ‘It is in their culture to ….’ The picture emerging about Western armies is that of an invader alienated from the population and mystified by foreign human terrain. Dehumanizing the victim fits within the simplication achieved by technologies of precision bombing and satellite images objectifying communities into targets.

If the battle between nations is a thing of the past, a constant state of war named securitization has entered our economy, technology, geopolitical thought and entertainment.¹⁹ The high number of casualties during and after the invasion in Iraq in 2003, estimated at a total of over 600,000, were ‘clean’ killings going by the bloodless TV footage and satellite images.²⁰ More than a hundred thousand civilian casualties fell in the subsequent wars of the allied forces in the region including Afghanistan. The killings were the outcome of a decision process by American and European democracies. Between the decisions and the killings runs an unbroken line. Besides drones, night-vision goggles, armored vehicles and digital maps of clean destruction, there have been simplexes in media discourse categorizing populations. Eliminating the complexity of life has become a war technology.

The introduction sketched the background for these observations on contemporary warfare. Disconnection between meaning and feeling causes violent meanings to spread like bundles of energy, unhampered by the mediation of feelings. Education, the hard and soft sciences, is supposed to prevent the unintended effects and their escalation. Citizens should know, or better ‘intuit’, the alarming trends. But have they been educated for that? The central principle the sciences train us in is simplication, a translation esthetically appealing but treacherous. An example is the Cartesian simplication replacing geometric shapes of Euclidean space by algebraic equations. The translation works marvelously as long as one remembers that this deductive reasoning from innate ideas is a rationalist chimera, at best an approximation of reality, because in the empirical world no such perfectly linear shapes can be found.

School is a simplication machine so its epistemology perfected at university cannot counter the simplexes. Confrontation with the empirical, historical situation can, through social analysis. So too can zooming out to the cultural analysis of frames and their shifts. New Age books and therapeutic weekends sometimes help to snap out of our simplex frames, but for a durable effect this spiritual-critical sensitivity has to be integrated in knowledge. The pressure on schooling, on teachers, has been enormous. Besides being warned about the dissociations that technology and media communication stimulate, students have to be convinced of the good outcome of democracy, that each person’s limited political impact on the direct environment is for the best, and that knowledge disseminated by arrogant, quarreling scholars is more trustworthy than one’s personal experience or the words of a supreme being and religion.

The risk of science reinforcing the simplication machine, by inadvertently stimulating a frame and search of certainty, becomes sharper as we zoom out to events in another region of the world. I discuss a case from eastern Africa where incomplete secondary school education poisons a protective cultural frame without sufficiently planting an alternative. The main motive, though, of ethnographic comparison from other regions of the world is to get insight into the meaning system of humanity. Regional partitions tell a lie, reinforcing simplex society. Humans have shared origins that a speciated history reveals.

Witchcraft as Science

She’s medicine. For now, let’s say magic. A child with white hair and red eyes is slighted with the slur zeruzeru in areas south of Lake Victoria. Everyone recognizes the condition called albinism. Some—an increasing number it is said—also see in such person a highly sought ingredient of magic. Mwanga, light, is among clients a secret Swahili name for the medicine.

In the mid-1990s a series of witch-killings across this region, where farmers speak KiSukuma, had alerted the Tanzanian government. Once these events were supplemented in the 2000s with murders for the medicinal trade of body parts, the government stepped up interventions, forbidding professional healers to perform divinations and rituals.²¹ In that region I did my first long-term ethnographic fieldwork from 1995 until 1997.

Strangely enough, the name says it all. Mwanga, light, conveys an inexorable causality. The skin of the victim is light colored, like the diamond the digger seeks in the pit deep under the ground; like the fish lighting up in the dark water of the lake. Diamond-diggers and fishermen, both reputed for the short-term gains they live by, supposedly buy Mwanga. The word alone makes the heart tremble. One must picture as background scene Ichakaya, ‘where the home dies’, the nickname for an unmapped fishery village at the lakeshore with many small bars, boda boda taxi motor-bikers shouting for customers and out-of-school youth strolling aimlessly, playing distorted radios at maximum volume.²²

The causality the name Mwanga asserts is something new, for the claimed effect of the magic diverts from what is traditionally expected. No oracle to verify ancestral approval would be needed for Mwanga. The magical recipe has a truth that points to a frame of certainty. The invention of Mwanga is like a nightmare come true. People living with albinism are killed. The murder is a human sacrifice, experienced as an investment with guaranteed outcome: luck. Gone are the frames of experience that users go through in initiation to deserve magic, an initiation and use of medicine that ancestors moreover had to sanction. What has happened in this part of Africa, after the violence of colonization and the neoliberal effects of economic globalization?²³

‘He did not do it’, I remember my friend Masanja saying. Unlike most Tanzanian farmers I worked with, he was fluent in Swahili, with a touch of Sukuma mother tongue. During the divinations and medicinal rituals attended since 1995 until that morning in 2018, he often was the onlooker whispering to me. It had become second nature for him to translate events to me, even when he knew I could follow what was happening. He just wanted to make sure his version somehow entered the papers I would write. Had he spoken English and been brought up in the right milieu he would have been a first-rate academic. A born anthropologist he was, moreover with a joyful disposition, a disarming smile that lights up the immediate vicinity, and with looks invariably appreciated by the ladies. By now Masanja is a tranquil middle-aged elder.

‘I don’t … believe him’, I replied hesitantly. We are talking about our friend, the healer Kalemi.²⁴ He was incarcerated for three years in the overcrowded prison of Butimba near Mwanza. After his release, Kalemi started a new healing business three hundred kilometers south from the compound where we met him first. Masanja had been able to retrace him and discuss what happened to him. Kalemi denied the allegations we had heard, that he had been involved in the murderous trade. His spirit guide did not let him.

But what about the economic pressures and the concomitant change of traditional beliefs, I wondered. Surely, soon after the death of the famous diviner in a neighboring village, who catered for diamond-diggers, her crowd of clients would move his way? They counted on seriously powerful medicine. Kalemi had mainly been treating young people with sexual dysfunctions caused by witchcraft, like the one he had cured himself of. Long ago he narrated to us colorfully how he had dreamt the remedy after roaming the bush for weeks. Admittedly, I then saw before me mainly a young man who ran from home and wound up in the bush after leaving secondary school early without job prospects. Masanja and I had been impressed by his welcome when we visited him the first time, as he descended from his traditional hospital at the foot of one of the many rocky hills around Lake Victoria. His friendly face smiling above a fluttering black cloak, he addressed an imaginary crowd behind him: ‘Did I not just tell you my dream last night that a white man would stop by?’

Younger than us, Kalemi was definitely a flamboyant and charismatic figure. Pretty soon he was famed for his mediumistic oracles that provided detailed diagnoses and remedies, adapted to the new witchcrafts imported from neighboring countries Kenya, Burundi, DR Congo and Zambia in globalizing Africa, which traditional therapies could not grapple with. Why would he not have gone for the next level? The valley had known several years of drought. Terribly dry actually it was all around, compared to the mid-1990s. Like anybody else’s in the region, his first job remained farming. So, yes, I feared he eventually fell for the trade. For Masanja, the point was: ‘Kalemi just did not sell that thing, because his ancestor prohibited him.’ He knew how strong the bond was, how seriously healers take their dreams about the spirit.

My angle was crime. A gang does the killing. Healers have sadly succumbed to the call of money despite their ethical standards. And, in honesty, was the supposition of business being opposite to their ethics not a product of my upbringing anyway, which the healers gladly enacted before the eyes of the organizing NGO-personnel during government-funded meetings on ‘the integration of traditional medicine’? Crime made for a convenient academic explanation because the alternative chilled my (and the NGO’s) blood. What if a murderous business is legitimate in a cultural system that considers a community’s internal warfare (witchcraft) as the natural state of society? More generally, what do ethics look like in this rural community that does not differentiate the subsystems of politics, economy, religion, education and medicine, their equation excluding the possibility of any ‘subsystem’ (say medicine) being safeguarded against the norms of another (say business)? There protrudes the idea that frightens. Just imagine that the ancestor speaking through the oracle advises to make money for the family and kill. What if (a large percentage of) Sukuma healers were culturally justified in this way to sacrifice a person living with albinism? And surely, the most mercantile among them master the divinatory tools well enough to manipulate the outcome of oracles. All in all, let’s thank the modern state for intervening in this part of Africa?

Interpretation of the cultural system in its own terms can shed another light. It integrates the frame of experience before determining the meaning of a practice, statement or event. Local medicine obeys principles that Mwanga magic brutally transformed. Our basis to speak of ‘its own terms’ and ‘changed principles’ is the ethnographic study of frames. The above analysis can go on oscillating between comprehension and shock until we turn back to the ethnography and the frames wherein people experience. A case in point is the principle of uncertainty, following a medicine’s dependence on ‘blessing’, lubango in KiSukuma. Mwanga was an invention that seemed to need no blessing. What does this tell us about the frame to experience Mwanga? For one thing, it was an exceptional kind of magic, not at all representative of the Sukuma medicine I had been initiated in. Initiation, which is where a cultural analysis commences, taught to not overrate the witch’s craft.²⁵

Uncertainty and the Real

The concept of blessing recurs in many cultures and belief systems. Some mean by it an invisible force, others a concrete ancestral spirit, and there are those opting for the abstract ‘luck’. An anthropological concept that covers the existential uncertainty caused by any of the three is ‘the real’. The real originates outside experience, outside the symbolic order such as language, or the imaginary of our inner life.²⁶ The biological event of pain, the spark of love or the epiphany in an aesthetic experience overwhelm us as moments of the real. Like the flip of a coin in response to a dilemma, the real imposes itself out of the blue. Whereas symbols fashion an event into reality, the real itself does not obey any law. Its origins are unknown, in analogy with the etymological meaning of the kindred term ‘contingency’ derived from the Latin contingere, ‘to arrive’. It arrived. From where, nobody knows.

Whenever a Sukuma farmer, man or woman, looked me in the eye to talk about their recently deceased child or close relative, I saw deep sadness, but I also felt that in this culture, where illness, famine and the death of relatives are regular occurrences in life, the events would not destroy them. Sukuma farmers have a frame to deal with these events because the basic standpoint they have been brought up in is to live with uncertainty. More than using the medicine, one cannot do. To accept the real as a factor in life is a feat of multiplex society.

In simplex society reigns the pretense of certainty. Europeans may boast to their American friends that at least they have a proper system of social security and do not have to accumulate jobs, or panic in case of debilitating illness. The fact of the matter is that both regions of the North separated by the Atlantic ocean are equally unable to live with uncertainty.²⁷ Both the American dream and its kindred antipode, the European social security system, situate progress in more certainty, in freeing oneself of the fear of natural, economic or other disaster. Initiatives in the domains of schooling, politics, economy, science and religion share the same drive, which fundamentally differs from that in animist, Buddhist or medicinal frames of experience teaching to live with contingency. (“Chapter Eight: Healer or King” will argue that the drive has less to do with Western cultural history than with universal traits of power and political centralization.)

Mwanga is a contemporary invention that changed the principle of medicine. The frame of medicine now evokes something unreal, like ‘magic’ in the plain sense indeed. ‘Magic works. It is African science’, a highly educated Pentecostalist told us during our discussions at the peak of the witch-hunts in the late 1990s. I expected Masanja to rejoice as son of a renowned healer. He did not. He laughed. Before him stood a Tanzanian refusing initiation into medicine and unaware of the whims of the ancestor. The preacher forgot that medicine has unpredictable outcomes depending on ancestral blessing. Not only the preacher forgot the difference with medical science. Over the years, under colonial and Western influences of globalization, certain practices of local medicine underwent radical simplication. Mwanga is a case in point. The process is also visible in the witchcraft beliefs of Pentecostalist churches, we will see.²⁸

Mwanga magic is a simplex. It one-dimensionally compares medicines in terms of their strength, which is said to be relative to the torture inflicted on the living ingredient. The medicine omits the layer of ancestor, in short the real, a ‘sacrifice’ which Sukuma medicines require. In principle, to cool (kupoja) things down, one must accept the heat (nsebu) of sacrifice. This heat of uncertain danger is located in the forest and represented by the ancestral spirit. Participation being the only legitimate way of observing an initiation, Masanja and I had as researchers accumulated cult memberships to observe in different settings the act of ritual power that was sacrifice. We experienced sacrifice in many variants. To enter the society of village elderhood (Bunamhala), I went through a physical ordeal in the bush and had to make a life-long promise. To become Chwezi spirit mediums, we participated in the symbolic transgression of a sexual taboo at the foot of the ancestral termite mount. To perform purification for the Mabasana association, the parents of twins collected personal items representing their home. We saw them put these in a gourd, to be buried at the bottom of a river. In each sacrifice, the presence of the ancestor was verified through an oracle. In Mwanga magic, however, people living with albinism were murdered, without ancestral consent. The ancestor apparently did not need to consent, because the outcome of the act was natural, much like the natural laws Kalemi had learned about in the first years of secondary school before he dropped out. Had he finished school, I am thinking, he would have known about the big ‘if’, the condition for scientists to be aware of their simpl(if)ication. Science is a controlled act to translate complexity by thinking away layers of meaning.

The torturing of a white body to obtain a white thing sounds like an act of sacrifice. ‘Human sacrifice’ comes to mind. Yet, culturally, it is the opposite, for sacrifice implies uncertainty of outcome, the unsure arrival of something blatantly real. The ancestral recipient may choose to reciprocate, or not. In the latter case the patient dies. Sacrifice is not a gift rendering the receiving ancestor indebted to a counter-gift. The possibility of ancestral absence or wrath, which is the actual sacrificial moment within every cooling practice, is missing in the logic of Mwanga magic. Gifts render the recipient beholden. Sacrifice follows another logic. I recognize in the modern African invention of Mwanga the simplication of technology we encountered in drones doing remote-controlled killing. The sacrificial condition missing in the new magic resembles war-technology’s preclusion of contingency and face-to-face decisions about life and death. The old magic did not preclude these, and therefore was no simplex. What prevents simplications from sedimenting into simplexes is to not take an action or a statement at face value. The following cultural comparison of two societies makes frame-aware as well as sphere- and source-conscious before determining meaning.

Statement, Frame, Sphere and Source

• Society A: ‘Beloved ones bless you, some wish you evil. You feel the power? You feel the curse? Destiny or witches or spirits or god(s) or a higher species, unknown forces play a role in life. Magic exists: “for sure!” Or maybe not.’

• Society B: ‘Experiments tell us what is real. The laws of nature. Our knowledge of them can be exact to the point that we predict the future. Invisible forces can be deduced. The regularity of their effects gives them away. Otherwise, the forces and laws do not exist. Without science, humans would fool themselves. There is no magic. For sure.’

The quotation marks of the first ‘for sure’ by society A make all the difference. The marks envelop the statement about magic (M in Fig. 2) to frame it with uncertainty (symbolized below by the preceding ‘?’). Yes, in this society almost everybody has been trained into medicine or knows something about it. Soft magic.

Fig. 2

Social, cultural and existential dimensions of magic

Does the statement without quotation marks in Society B have no frame? Of course not, every statement has. Scientific claims are formulated in rationally purified terms or via empirically based percentages of probability, in such a way that the claim or probability can be accompanied by a frame of certainty (symbolized by the preceding ‘!’). The frame reflects one’s intention. A scientist strives for absolute truth.

According to the scientist’s pure reason, believers in magic are wrong (strikethrough M, M). Yet, what happens when that same frame of certainty envelops the statement that magic exists? Then the statement is unmediated and appears frameless, like a simplex. That is the scheme’s third case which represents Mwanga. Hard magic. Horrific. Like murder by the drone and double tab.

We cannot understand the effect of a statement unless we consider its frame. Applying the frame of uncertainty to the belief in magic results in hope among the users in the domain of medicine. Applying the frame of certainty to the disbelief in magic leads to exclusion in the domain of science, and marginalizes the believers in magic. The exclusion of magic out of caution in the second statement does not exhibit the tolerance of the first statement’s live and let live (no harm no foul). Why have we learned to reject it outright? Answer: the scientific frame transmitted in society B does not consider the frames when judging the statements. Science inclines to statements that are frameless; that is the whole point of delimiting a specialization.

The macroscale of the sphere and the sources of production, a third and fourth element next to statement and frame, co-determine what an event means (see last two columns in Fig. 2). Any statement or behavior affects a section of the social network, the spatially and temporally wider effects of an event. The certainty frame permits to standardize behavior in a sphere. It has the advantage of making people reliable. By advantage I mean the effect on a source of production such as peace. Many similar activities of trading and processing can occur in parallel and join each other at some stage without requiring communication and negotiation every time. It is courageous—a courage a modernized society can pride itself on—to seek and formulate statements that everyone can apply in a sphere of exchange irrespective of context. It is a pressure that the knowledge society imposes on itself: to combat contingency, the real. Note that society A and society B are equally capable of keeping society together and violence at bay. Their frames and spheres differ, but the outcome is similar in protecting peace.

After the comparison between societies A and B, what to think of the third possibility? The horror is ![M]: people blindly believing in magic. They lost the feel for the witch’s craft. This premodern society imagined by moderns never existed, until today. Mwanga realizes it in Africa. And so does post-knowledge society, I argue. Both instantiate simplex society.

Of course, some extenuating circumstances should be mentioned. The complex economic situation around buzzling Lake Victoria calls for inventive solutions by the underprivileged to get a piece of the pie. The use of magic is a welcome simplication, simplifying access to capital through a ritual obeying the harsh logic of capital. The simplication spawned a simplex because of the sphere it ended up in, which undermined frameshift and people’s wise sense of contingency. The sphere, which together with statement and frame determines the meaning of an event, is the market in a medicinal network incorporating illicit businesses from Tanzania and neighboring Burundi and Zambia. The market is a sphere tending toward massification and institutionalization of items because of rumor and media attention. All six aspects of the simplex are involved (see “Chapter Five: Simplex Communication Society”). In the famous words of Evans-Pritchard, cited by Gluckman and later the Comaroffs, ‘new situations demand new magic’.²⁹ Everybody needs hard magic in the new economic sphere of late capitalism.

The convergence of the same process in areas far apart, the US, Europe and rural Africa, sets one thinking. Are we observing in humanity at large a growing addiction to the simplex? The information society and its social network specialize in informing to influence. They idealize the reliability of machines. Living with uncertainty—with contingency or imperceptible factors—is a capacity that humans are no longer initiated and trained in. Does this entail the entropy of feeling meaning? We have no indication of the contemporary psyche being more frightened and less empathic, blocking out sentiments of confidence and compassion, for instance. In the early phase of the Covid epidemic, civilians volunteered and helped each other out, more than expected. The question is comparable to the perennial issue debated by psychologists whether cruel games make children more violent.³⁰ The jury is out, do not hold your breath, because they might be asking the wrong question. The network of events and communications that constitute society has roughened without the psyche needing to follow suit.³¹ The very fact of society becoming crueler, in security measures, medical ethics and games of leisure, permits the psyche to retain its sensitivities. The price is ‘just’ a mind’s disconnection from reality. Or in my analytical terms: our spheres are unmoored from the sources of production. The cruelty against the duped is not less when the simplexes of the mind such as negative framing have been eradicated while the simplexes of the world, the bubbles that spheres have become, tolerate the injustice elsewhere.

Among Sukuma farmers, medicine is an art taught to all members since the first initiation. In contrast, the magic that kills people living with albinism does not require initiation because draws on a natural law. The law, unknown to Sukuma tradition, partakes of an ‘African science’. The user need not know the details of the recipe. Just swallow it, like pushing a button. The moral cost is high but the outcome guaranteed. Mwanga south of the equator reproduces the simplication the whole world is experiencing. The omission of sacrifice in magic epitomizes communication without mediation. The illusion of unmediated communication threatens to destroy society from within.

What do the human disasters of the past century have in common? At the root of impasse and violence lay not the statements, the irrational premises which better knowledge resolves, but the frame, the perspective of certainty. That endangers life when applied to the wrong premise. Would the holocaust have been possible if membership of the nation had not been seen as objective?³² The genocide in the highly Christianized Rwanda of the early 1990s is not imaginable without the killers’ frame of certainty, in this case about the other ethnicity, Hutu or Tutsi. The cultural systems of Christianity and Rwandan kingship merged into a frame, a rigidifying force. The frame was unique in Africa for pretty much schooling away the population’s belief in magic and traditional healing.³³ At exceptional moments of crisis when a witch is identified to be killed, the frame of pure reason emerges. A simplex society is a special case, constantly in such state of self-inflicted crisis. A tensor can remedy, as proposed in the de-simplication of “Chapter Two: Frameshift”.

Figure 2 compared statements seen within their frame from a culture, observed as an event in a sphere within humanity, affecting people’s energy via a source of production. The various semantic layers should be taken into account to interpret the event. To make up our minds and judge the good of a practice, I underlined the source of production, which evokes humanity as a sphere parallel to local culture. Consider a recent case illustrating why sound policy involves all dimensions. A minister’s refusal to comply with the requests of asylum seekers on hunger strike to regularize their status as residents shocked the media. Newspaper pictures showed the emaciated bodies of blindfolded refugees lying bare-chested on the cobblestones of a Brussels market square. Some of them could die.³⁴ If we connect the political frame of the minister’s statement to the sphere of social engineering, which would be his job, then we understand his fear of lenience as a precedent attracting more asylum seekers and human trafficking. The statement ‘asylum seekers are in need’ summoned us to regularize, also in combination with the frame ‘EU has the means’, but not when broadening the sphere to the nation and considering the impact on the social network and hardening politics: ‘increased illegal immigration will gravely unsettle EU voters.’

The feeling of meaning transforms by comprising the third dimension, that of life. What is the relevant sphere to protect life? The opponents of regularization, like the minister, assume that to be the nation-state. It once was, but globalization has extended the relevant sphere to the globe. Hence the argument changes. Asylum seekers, whether those reaching an EU country or those who did not and live elsewhere, belong as much as anybody else to all corners of the planet. The most ethical position is the one integrating all dimensions, in this case being true to the actual situation of a globalized world. Therefore, the future will be to regularize the seeking. It will bring humanity back to its origins, when land was part of the commons. Perhaps humans can intuit this speciated history and therefore feel that to be most ethical. At this stage, the electoral system whereupon a minister depends is national, so not adapted. In Stiglitz’s words, economic globalization never got to be political.³⁵ To make humanity the relevant sphere for life again is the task ahead. The next chapter shows the civilizational work undertaken to achieve the contrary, imagining each local sphere, ‘culture’, to have a separate source of production, without the species in parallel connecting the sources.