Comments on: Faith in progress

By: Dick Eagleson

Dick Eagleson — Thu, 03 Feb 2005 03:42:47 +0000

Diamond’s thesis is fundamentally nonsense – apples vs. oranges. No, scratch that – vegetables vs. animals. His allegedly cautionary examples are all imperia that existed during eras when technological stasis was the lesson of history, the rational expectation and, in most ways, the ideal. In contrast, our modern, transnational social order – of which the U.S. is the largest component and purest exemplar – has been “designed” to not only accommodate technological change, but to accelerate it. The former societies were brittle. Move them even a little way beyond their design limits and they cracked up. Modern society, in stark contrast, exhibits the qualities of toughness and ductility. It can absorb significant shocks without shattering and can reshape itself to meet novel challenges. Scoffing at the possibility of scientific/technological feats that, however Buck Rogers-ish they may sound to the untutored, are well within the bounds of known physical law, has become a defining characteristic of the post-modern leftist worldview. Thus, “post-modern” is a usefully denotative term. It refers to a leftism that is, in its essentials, pessimistic. This sharply distinguishes it from modernist leftism – that of the 20th Century Marxist revolutionaries and their avant garde cheerleaders from the salons of 20’s Paris through 60’s New York – which was characterized by an integral optimism. This optimism derived from a conviction – explicit in the form of Marx’s “historical inevitability” or less sharp-edged as a general sense of “the times” – that the world was going in “our” direction. The more time went by, however, the harder it would get for anyone with a scrap of intellectual honesty to maintain this view. At some point between roughly 1968 and 1978 the tipping point was reached, then exceeded. Leftism detached itself from its moorings in reality and floated off into Cloud Cuckooland, gaining altitude and suffering progressive anoxic brain damage with each passing year. As “the masses” increasingly made clear their disinclination to be “liberated” from their humanity, and even their lives, the symptoms of this decline could be seen in the increasingly farcical search for something – anything – that could plausibly take the place of “class” in the now-catechistic “class war.” Race was, for a time, the – pardon the pun – Great White Hope. Despite massive efforts to install a whole new set of melanin-based fences and watchtowers, some of the damned darkies kept perversely wandering off the reservation. Gender? Same unsatisfactory results. Having pretty much exhausted the possibilities represented by regretably refractory humans, the next stop was animals – PETA and vegans and ALF, oh my! The big advantage for the left from here on out was that there was no longer any possibility of having to endure embarassing backtalk by the objects of one’s alleged solicitude. The relevance of this is that the only thread connecting modernist leftism with its increasingly feeble and degenerate post-modernist forms was the central conceit that it is morally necessary that everyone and everything subordinate itself to the rule of the left. Justifications may come and go, but megalomania is, at least on the left, immortal. Given that rule is the end, the alleged means could be tailored to suit. It had to be something big, though. If it wasn’t big, there was no way to scare enough people into surrendering their liberty to the “vanguard of the proletariat” – oops, I meant the “protectors of the environment.” Rallying the troops remaining after its previous litany of defeats, the left regrouped and marched bravely off to save the exploited vegetation from the ravages of unbridled capitalism. Spike the trees! Save the rainforests! Bring me a shrubbery! Well and truly up against the wall at last, there was nothing for it but to go for the whole damn blue marble. Save the planet! Rescue Gaia! Stop global warming! We infuriating technophiles had damn well better not figure out how to live, eat, keep warm and drive our SUV’s forever. What happens to the Revolution then?

By: Brett Bellmore

Brett Bellmore — Wed, 02 Feb 2005 01:58:20 +0000

You get a server error, it’s best to go off to some other site, and come back in a few minutes; You’ll usually find that your post did in fact “take”. I think the chief advantage we’ve got over the Easter Islanders, or the Greenlanders, is that there are so many of us; We number enough to sustain real diversity, to explore multiple options at once. Globalization could indeed take that away from us, blending us all together into a single world culture that moves in lockstep, but I think that trend is going to take long enough that we’ll get into space first. THEN all bets are off.

By: eyelessgame

eyelessgame — Tue, 01 Feb 2005 18:43:33 +0000

My sincere apologies. It didn’t just delay, it announced server errors. I promise to trust it next time.

By: eyelessgame

eyelessgame — Tue, 01 Feb 2005 18:07:26 +0000

I’m distressed by the small number of liberal futurists out there. I share the faith that we can solve problems with technology—this is obvious, since we see the solutions right here—the question is whether we will. Because, as Diamond points out, civilizations can fall. Ours has the potential not to—but only the potential, and for as long as we deny the danger, we increase it. My heart is with the people who say “we can make it to the stars” and firmly against the people who say “we must lower expectations and live smaller”—but I am terrified by the fantasy that reaching the stars is inevitable, and that our foolish choices don’t have potentially fatal consequences. And I couldn’t ask for a better statement of the fantasy mindset than this quote, upthread:

the same rational skepticism points towards rejecting both extremes together, for the same reasons, and assuming that humankind will muddle through on planet Earth much more effectively than, say, the Easter Islanders did.

The thing missing here is the realization that “Easter Islanders” are “humankind”.

By: eyelessgame

eyelessgame — Tue, 01 Feb 2005 17:57:18 +0000

the same rational skepticism points towards rejecting both extremes together, for the same reasons, and assuming that humankind will muddle through on planet Earth much more effectively than, say, the Easter Islanders did.

The thing missing here is the realization that “Easter Islanders” are “humankind”.

By: eyelessgame

eyelessgame — Tue, 01 Feb 2005 17:55:37 +0000

I’m distressed by the small number of liberal futurists out there. I share the faith that we can solve problems with technology—this is obvious, since we see the solutions right here—the question is whether we will. Because, as Diamond points out, civilizations can fall. Ours has the potential not to—but only the potential, and for as long as we deny the danger, we increase it. My heart is with the people who say “we can make it to the stars” and firmly against the people who say “we must lower expectations and live smaller”—but I am terrified by the fantasy that it’s inevitable that reaching the stars is inevitable. It was inevitable for the Romans, too. And I couldn’t ask for a better statement of the fantasy mindset than this quote, upthread:

the same rational skepticism points towards rejecting both extremes together, for the same reasons, and assuming that humankind will muddle through on planet Earth much more effectively than, say, the Easter Islanders did.

The thing missing here is the realization that “Easter Islanders” are “humankind”.

By: eyelessgame

eyelessgame — Tue, 01 Feb 2005 17:54:39 +0000

I’m distressed by the small number of liberal futurists out there. I share the faith that we can solve problems with technology—this is obvious, since we see the solutions right here—the question is whether we will. Because, as Diamond points out, civilizations can fall. Ours has the potential not to—but only the potential, and for as long as we deny the danger, we increase it. My heart is with the people who say “we can make it to the stars” and firmly against the people who say “we must lower expectations and live smaller”—but I am terrified by the fantasy that it’s inevitable that reaching the stars is inevitable. It was inevitable for the Romans, too. And I couldn’t ask for a better statement of the fantasy mindset than this quote, upthread:

the same rational skepticism points towards rejecting both extremes together, for the same reasons, and assuming that humankind will muddle through on planet Earth much more effectively than, say, the Easter Islanders did.

The thing missing here is the realization that “Easter Islanders” are “humankind”.

By: jet

jet — Tue, 01 Feb 2005 14:52:51 +0000

Rob, heh, one final note. Persia projected a far larger number of men into Greece than Greece ever did in Persia. The Ottoman empire managed to project quite a bit of men into Europe. The Muslim empire of 8th-9th century Africa had no problem projecting large numbers of men into the Iberian pennusula. The supior ability of Western civ to project men outside of Europe was a relatively late occurance that didn’t happen until the crusades. Before then, the large Asian and African empires always had the edge (as far as projecting more men). I promise, no more posts, I’ve made all the points I’m capable of makign on this :P

By: jet

jet — Tue, 01 Feb 2005 14:45:13 +0000

Rob, To respond to what you said to Jack, I go back to my decentralizing of power as to why the West could always project more power than their Eastern/American counterparts. More Greeks killed Greeks than Persians killed Greeks. That was because the Greeks had a much better combat system. The reason they had a much better combat system was because the people doing the fighting had a say in how he would be fighting. This led to better equipment, formations, weapon choices, and more importantly, much better Generals. But I seem to have left out the most important fact of all. When the polis of Rome learned of the defeat at Cannae, they simple shrugged it off and voted, for the most part, to raise another army and fight to the last man. Wouldn’t a more slave/non-citizen empire have had trouble raising more armies that size, or if they could, keeping the soldiers from fleeing the horrible Hannibal? It might also be a good point that Greek equipment was better than Persian. That Roman equipment was better than African. That Cortez might as well have had lightsabers compared to Aztecian weapons. That military evolution can be driven by the fact that the people who did the dieing had a say over how they fought.

By: jet

jet — Tue, 01 Feb 2005 14:36:10 +0000

Rob, Good points, but I still think we are ships passing each other in the night. When I speak of decentralization, I mean that in most Greek states, especially pre-Alexander, the polis held the power. A large minority of the people being ruled, were the rulers. Whether that was an oligarchy or a large group of citizens (like those who ordered Aristotle killed), the power was dispersed to those who did the fighting, generaling, and running of the economy. While in Persia, the actual application of power was much less centralized do to the size of the empire, the power was still centralized in a tiny minority of theocratic rulers who all answered to the word slave. The emporer spoke to his reagents by calling them his slaves. That pretty much sums up my point. Greek armies developed better methods of fighting because their soldiers could act on their desires to not get their asses handed to them in the next fight. While a Persian army simply had the cowards executed and fought the next battle the same way. The Greek soldiers could vote (sometimes) to get better equipment, or vote to elect their new general. The Persians had the emporer’s new favorite pet appointed as their general. The Greeks fought to minimize their deaths and maximize their enemies. The Persians only fought to win, who cared how many slave-soldiers died doing it. And off and on, that is the story of western culture throughout the years ending with my point that the soldiers directly under Cortez took him to court for incompetance. Is it even imaginable that the generals of the Persian armies appointment didnt’ come down to the decision of one man, be it the emporer or one of his flunkies? Or that an Aztecian or Persian soldier could bring charges against their general, or have a say in who their general was? One method leads to the weeding out of the bad and the evolution of warfare. The other method is more static and would always evolve slower. So Western culture and how it fought evolved faster do to the Greek tradition of giving the people power. But in a world full of abominatinons, what Western culture did with their military might was an abomination of abominations, although it is hard to cry for the destroyed Persians or crushed Aztecs.

By: rob

rob — Tue, 01 Feb 2005 11:09:07 +0000

Jim, Empires are not the same thing as centralized states. Although the Ottoman Empire, for example, was ostensibly unified under a single ruler, there was relatively wide-spread devolution of power, so that the ruler of Egypt was able to rise up and overthrow the Emperor in the 1830s. Likewise, the Mughals never managed to conquer the whole of the Subcontinent, and tended to use a semi-feudal system to administrate the areas they did, meaning that power was not heavily centralized. If diversity is all that matters, then these societies should have been able to repel European encroachments, since the devolution of power kept them diverse and they had the threat of external enemies (the Europeans in the case of the Turks, and the Southern Indians and Central Asians in the case of the Mughals). I think the ability to project power is the key thing, which is significantly increased by the centralization of decision making and authority which accomopanied the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth century in Europe. Jet I think you’ve misunderstood what I meant by centralization, which may well be because I misunderstood what you meant by centralization. To my mind, Greek city states were very heavily centralized because almost all political power within a given state was reserved to a single body – a monarch, a group of oligarchs, or the citizens assembled in the forum. In contrast, the Persian Empire wasn’t very heavily centralized because the authority of the Emperor had to be exercised through intermediaries at great distance who could create clienteles of their own. In the sense of centralization as being the opposite of plural sources of political power, the Greek states, simply by virtue of their relative size, must have been more centralized than the Persian Empire, which merely because of the difficulty of ruling a large area must have had disparate and competing political authorities. Emperors may be de jure absolute, but are almost never de facto absolute, and what is de facto is more important.

By: Heiko Gerhauser

Heiko Gerhauser — Tue, 01 Feb 2005 09:38:38 +0000

I think there is a fundamental misunderstanding here. Techno-optimists like myself argue that we already have the technology available to avoid extinction of the human race from energy shortages, resource shortages or environmental problems like global warming. Reference to space is about potential possibilities. If they don’t occur, we can happily live, 10 billion of us, for billions of years on Earth at living standards exceeding current US standards by a fair margin, without any new technological developments. Accumulation of capital (eg wind turbines) alone is enough to get us from where we are now, with plenty of people still poor, to there. If they do happen, we may have trillions of people strewn all over the galaxy in a few thousand years.

By: Jack

Jack — Tue, 01 Feb 2005 08:43:59 +0000

jet, for an argument from a well not poisoned by greenpeace http://www.slate.com/Default.aspx?id=2112608&

By: Jack

Jack — Tue, 01 Feb 2005 08:25:21 +0000

jet, so your SUV is really saving lives? Anyway, are you both sure that reducing fossil fuel consumption would be so economically diastrous that attempting to moderate use of it would lead to mass poverty and sure that when oil runs out and Chinese demand is as big as US demand there won’t be serious problems?

By: jet

jet — Tue, 01 Feb 2005 02:42:52 +0000

While I’m making corrections, let me make this one: “When you speak of centralization of Spain as a state, trust me when I say that 1000 years before Spain, Persia was much more centralized.” is wrong. I don’t mean as far as state hood but as far as how power in the culture was handled. 16th Spain had codefied rights for its citizens. Not many other places outside of Europe did.