When I read the 3-step process at the start of your vent, the first thing I thought of was Star Trek, of all things, since a popular fan pastime is to imagine how we get/got there. Then I remembered that the writers settled on social collapse and a global nuclear war as the turning point. And then Heinlein's Future History, where the US turns into Gilead before collapsing, enabling the creation of THE FIRST MATURE HUMAN CIVILIZATION, as Bob put it in his famous timeline.
Much like that Long Boom buffoon, they didn't put much sweat equity into the rebuild portion, only that some how This Time We Won't Make The Same Mistakes. Yeah, the "populist" movement will just "flame out". Like you, the prospect of untangling that hairball of prognostication leaves me weary. These people are just not very bright, things are already out of hand, and they will not have the authority, capacity, legitimacy, or will to take the control they assume will be theirs.
I think it's likely that the current regime will not end well, but the amount of harm it will do before it's gone gets more frightening every day. It is certainly possible that those of us who survive it will be able to build better systems that are inclusive and better protection against all kinds of coups, but it's also a possibility that we get something worse. As you say, "The arc of history only bends toward justice if we, ourselves, bend it."
And anybody who thinks the end of the "welfare bureaucratic state" -- by which I assume he means Social Security, Medicare, and the other baby steps we've made towards the kind of entitlements we actually need -- is "progressive" is not imagining a future I want to live in.
Thanks for reminding of that techno-pragmatism essay and for giving me a reason to lay down this Williams James line:
Thus, just as pragmatism faces forward to the future, so does rationalism here again face backward to a past eternity. True to her inveterate habit, rationalism reverts to 'principles,' and thinks that when an abstraction once is named, we own an oracular solution.
I liken our democracy to a very delicate, broken vase with the population massed inside, each holding a piece in place with one hand and/or someone else with the other. Then these right wing, authoritarian jerks come in and start pushing out in the cracks, and undermining every effort to hang it together.
Anyone who doesn't appreciate the delicacy of our democracy or who seeks to undermine it is flatly unfit to participate IN that democracy and should be cast out quickly and cleanly.
Bad education got us here. Only good education will save us.
A big chunk of what got us here is that most of our leadership, elites, and citizens believed the opposite, that like the Titanic our empire and government was unsinkable. An amiable dunce like Bush put some dents in it, but it was fundamentally sound and had always repaired itself before.
I love watching the lightbulbs go on as much as the next educated, thoughtful person, but I've grown increasingly suspicious of the notion that, of all our civil institutions, schools are the ones whose failures have gotten us here or can be expected to rescue us. That's a lot of pressure to put on teenagers doing their homework and the people who wrangle them for two hours at a stretch out of a week. The reason that presidents can win the Electoral College without winning the popular vote is not an educational problem. The gerrymandered mess of North Carolina elections is not a result of North Carolinans being inadequately trained as youths in the utility of free election, nor is DOGE ripping through the federal bureaucracy because of insufficient academic understanding of why that might be a bad idea. I think that we are first and foremost enmeshed in questions of power, not knowledge.
I mean, the furtherance of every avenue of political resistance we're seeing right now that isn't in a classroom? Does it seem like waiting for the youths to really love history class is what's gonna carry the day here? Union drives! A left-liberal response to the Federalist Society! Functional abolition of the Electoral College via state compacts! Human chains around detention centers and the businesses of oligarchs! Samizdat for reproductive care! Organized divestment pressure! Boycotts! Sit-ins and occupations! Conscientious objection!
I wanna be clear that I too want there to be an immediate gut reaction on the part of every new voter to this nonsense powered by a well-developed sense of political history from their schooling- but, in a world where young voters weren't breaking for Trump, is that really the problem? Hell, in a world where we are essentially only in this mess a second time because Trump won the first time on what amounted to a slavery-serving historical technicality, is any of this because enough people didn't know better? Circling back to 'but schools' always feels like a tremendously safe answer- who doesn't want the kids to come out better- but that universality sometimes strikes me as the liberal version of 'better mental health care' or 'thoughts and prayers' after mass shootings by the right- maybe the problem with the unstable person with the gun was the gun?
Thanks. I definitely appreciate your thoughts and agree with you. In truth, I was speaking about a longer term. No sane person would think we can reeducate our population quickly, so it's definitely a combination of near and long term efforts (action-focused, not hand-waving).
I recently built OperationSunshine.info to support one avenue of government engagement that I, as a former elected official, know can have an impact. It's not the only path, but it also supports near and long-term objectives.
" In the months since then, things have gone even worse than I expected. One reason I have been writing less frequently is I am so often dumbstruck by the news of the day."
You and me both Dave. I am playing a lot more guitar, and burying myself in work, because the news of he day is as bad as I thought (and I expected it to be quite grim. My fault was in not realizing how unrestrained Musk and DOGE would be, and how quickly Trump would move to test the constitution to its breaking point).
This is going to take 2, maybe three generations to undo. And that will be bleak. The damage to our reputation on the world stage will be the last thing we can repair.
If things in the future turn out, on balance, to be pretty good it will because people with integrity resisted authoritarianism with all their might and then worked creatively and persistently to build something new out of the ashes. ...but there will be lots of ashes, and those imply plenty of suffering for lots of people along the way.
And the problem is that should we rally and take this shit sandwich and turn it into a future where a historian is actually free to write an account of how it actually unfolded, the techno-determinists - like the Silicon Valley crowd - will claim that the outcome was inevitable, despite the fight to earn that future. The folks who believe that the long arc of history bends in a positive direction - instead of the folks who see history as a constant struggle against a Hobbesian state of nature.
I can't wait until Space becomes the magic fairy dust that ushers in a new Golden Age (after AI goes the way of the Metaverse), and I see my rocket and satellite stocks take off like Nvidia. (Assuming that said stocks are not confiscated in the meantime due to my thought crimes.)
Well said..! This is big problem I have with the rationalist / futurist / accelerationist (whatever they want to call themselves) way of thinking. What we do NOW has meaning and consequences. There's no point imagining all the future lives, especially if they're pretend, in-silico "lives" that a decision could make possible if you're burning civilization to the ground in the here and now.
Starting from some far distant, imagined utopia and back filling some imagined path to get there is the easy way of avoiding current responsibilities - nothing you can imagine can be proven or disproven because it hasn't happened. If people want to do that, they can... but it's called science fiction writing, not policy setting.
What we ARE NOW and what we DO NOW are all the meaning we are going to have. People often write sunny histories that just skip over all the nasty stuff between point A and sunny consequences. But we can't skip over the consequences of who we are and whether we are compassionate and courageous or not--being three score and ten, I'm all too aware that I'll be dead before the long term arrives. (My one year old grandchild is also unlikely to be alive to see the utopia that arrives in 2050)
The techno-optimists are inevitably techno-determinists, too- there is no problem that is not amenable to a technological solution, and everyone who thinks otherwise would have left us all without indoor plumbing, so there. It's a perspective that misses the obvious historical truth that different civilizations in equivalent environments with easy access to the same technological tools also routinely build civilizations in which the lived experience and success of people is radically different depending on what they decide is okay to do with their toys, up to the modern day. If we play anthropologist and let 'technology' encompass things like laws, it's trivial, and if we go full techbro and just mean 'whatever came out of Y Combinator last week' it is worthy of exactly zero serious contemplation.
When I read the 3-step process at the start of your vent, the first thing I thought of was Star Trek, of all things, since a popular fan pastime is to imagine how we get/got there. Then I remembered that the writers settled on social collapse and a global nuclear war as the turning point. And then Heinlein's Future History, where the US turns into Gilead before collapsing, enabling the creation of THE FIRST MATURE HUMAN CIVILIZATION, as Bob put it in his famous timeline.
Much like that Long Boom buffoon, they didn't put much sweat equity into the rebuild portion, only that some how This Time We Won't Make The Same Mistakes. Yeah, the "populist" movement will just "flame out". Like you, the prospect of untangling that hairball of prognostication leaves me weary. These people are just not very bright, things are already out of hand, and they will not have the authority, capacity, legitimacy, or will to take the control they assume will be theirs.
I think it's likely that the current regime will not end well, but the amount of harm it will do before it's gone gets more frightening every day. It is certainly possible that those of us who survive it will be able to build better systems that are inclusive and better protection against all kinds of coups, but it's also a possibility that we get something worse. As you say, "The arc of history only bends toward justice if we, ourselves, bend it."
And anybody who thinks the end of the "welfare bureaucratic state" -- by which I assume he means Social Security, Medicare, and the other baby steps we've made towards the kind of entitlements we actually need -- is "progressive" is not imagining a future I want to live in.
Thanks for reminding of that techno-pragmatism essay and for giving me a reason to lay down this Williams James line:
Thus, just as pragmatism faces forward to the future, so does rationalism here again face backward to a past eternity. True to her inveterate habit, rationalism reverts to 'principles,' and thinks that when an abstraction once is named, we own an oracular solution.
I liken our democracy to a very delicate, broken vase with the population massed inside, each holding a piece in place with one hand and/or someone else with the other. Then these right wing, authoritarian jerks come in and start pushing out in the cracks, and undermining every effort to hang it together.
Anyone who doesn't appreciate the delicacy of our democracy or who seeks to undermine it is flatly unfit to participate IN that democracy and should be cast out quickly and cleanly.
Bad education got us here. Only good education will save us.
A big chunk of what got us here is that most of our leadership, elites, and citizens believed the opposite, that like the Titanic our empire and government was unsinkable. An amiable dunce like Bush put some dents in it, but it was fundamentally sound and had always repaired itself before.
I love watching the lightbulbs go on as much as the next educated, thoughtful person, but I've grown increasingly suspicious of the notion that, of all our civil institutions, schools are the ones whose failures have gotten us here or can be expected to rescue us. That's a lot of pressure to put on teenagers doing their homework and the people who wrangle them for two hours at a stretch out of a week. The reason that presidents can win the Electoral College without winning the popular vote is not an educational problem. The gerrymandered mess of North Carolina elections is not a result of North Carolinans being inadequately trained as youths in the utility of free election, nor is DOGE ripping through the federal bureaucracy because of insufficient academic understanding of why that might be a bad idea. I think that we are first and foremost enmeshed in questions of power, not knowledge.
I'm interested in your proposed solution or strategy to change the impact of power.
I mean, the furtherance of every avenue of political resistance we're seeing right now that isn't in a classroom? Does it seem like waiting for the youths to really love history class is what's gonna carry the day here? Union drives! A left-liberal response to the Federalist Society! Functional abolition of the Electoral College via state compacts! Human chains around detention centers and the businesses of oligarchs! Samizdat for reproductive care! Organized divestment pressure! Boycotts! Sit-ins and occupations! Conscientious objection!
I wanna be clear that I too want there to be an immediate gut reaction on the part of every new voter to this nonsense powered by a well-developed sense of political history from their schooling- but, in a world where young voters weren't breaking for Trump, is that really the problem? Hell, in a world where we are essentially only in this mess a second time because Trump won the first time on what amounted to a slavery-serving historical technicality, is any of this because enough people didn't know better? Circling back to 'but schools' always feels like a tremendously safe answer- who doesn't want the kids to come out better- but that universality sometimes strikes me as the liberal version of 'better mental health care' or 'thoughts and prayers' after mass shootings by the right- maybe the problem with the unstable person with the gun was the gun?
Thanks. I definitely appreciate your thoughts and agree with you. In truth, I was speaking about a longer term. No sane person would think we can reeducate our population quickly, so it's definitely a combination of near and long term efforts (action-focused, not hand-waving).
I recently built OperationSunshine.info to support one avenue of government engagement that I, as a former elected official, know can have an impact. It's not the only path, but it also supports near and long-term objectives.
Subscribed!
Likewise!
" In the months since then, things have gone even worse than I expected. One reason I have been writing less frequently is I am so often dumbstruck by the news of the day."
You and me both Dave. I am playing a lot more guitar, and burying myself in work, because the news of he day is as bad as I thought (and I expected it to be quite grim. My fault was in not realizing how unrestrained Musk and DOGE would be, and how quickly Trump would move to test the constitution to its breaking point).
This is going to take 2, maybe three generations to undo. And that will be bleak. The damage to our reputation on the world stage will be the last thing we can repair.
Yeah.
If things in the future turn out, on balance, to be pretty good it will because people with integrity resisted authoritarianism with all their might and then worked creatively and persistently to build something new out of the ashes. ...but there will be lots of ashes, and those imply plenty of suffering for lots of people along the way.
And the problem is that should we rally and take this shit sandwich and turn it into a future where a historian is actually free to write an account of how it actually unfolded, the techno-determinists - like the Silicon Valley crowd - will claim that the outcome was inevitable, despite the fight to earn that future. The folks who believe that the long arc of history bends in a positive direction - instead of the folks who see history as a constant struggle against a Hobbesian state of nature.
I can't wait until Space becomes the magic fairy dust that ushers in a new Golden Age (after AI goes the way of the Metaverse), and I see my rocket and satellite stocks take off like Nvidia. (Assuming that said stocks are not confiscated in the meantime due to my thought crimes.)
I resisted using a computer for word processing essays and research writing in college until 1995.
I refused to get a cell phone until my son started driving.
I didn’t start using the internet until 2002.
I refused to buy a smartphone. My daughter bought one for me last year.
The guy who installed the new refrigerator wanted me to hook it up to the internet. I said why? He said so we can monitor it. For what?
No.
Well said..! This is big problem I have with the rationalist / futurist / accelerationist (whatever they want to call themselves) way of thinking. What we do NOW has meaning and consequences. There's no point imagining all the future lives, especially if they're pretend, in-silico "lives" that a decision could make possible if you're burning civilization to the ground in the here and now.
Starting from some far distant, imagined utopia and back filling some imagined path to get there is the easy way of avoiding current responsibilities - nothing you can imagine can be proven or disproven because it hasn't happened. If people want to do that, they can... but it's called science fiction writing, not policy setting.
What we ARE NOW and what we DO NOW are all the meaning we are going to have. People often write sunny histories that just skip over all the nasty stuff between point A and sunny consequences. But we can't skip over the consequences of who we are and whether we are compassionate and courageous or not--being three score and ten, I'm all too aware that I'll be dead before the long term arrives. (My one year old grandchild is also unlikely to be alive to see the utopia that arrives in 2050)
The techno-optimists are inevitably techno-determinists, too- there is no problem that is not amenable to a technological solution, and everyone who thinks otherwise would have left us all without indoor plumbing, so there. It's a perspective that misses the obvious historical truth that different civilizations in equivalent environments with easy access to the same technological tools also routinely build civilizations in which the lived experience and success of people is radically different depending on what they decide is okay to do with their toys, up to the modern day. If we play anthropologist and let 'technology' encompass things like laws, it's trivial, and if we go full techbro and just mean 'whatever came out of Y Combinator last week' it is worthy of exactly zero serious contemplation.