There is a great gap between the overthrow of authority and the creation of a substitute. That gap is called liberalism: a period of drift and doubt. We are in it today.
I think that the pace of technological change is intolerable, that it denies humans the dignity of continuity, states the competence to govern, and social scientists a society about which to accumulate knowledge.
But we’ve had technological change before! some object. And things turned out fine!
Commenter Bob, for example:
I want to say, “Whoa! Have things changed so much? Are things weird?” We don’t need any explanation at all for something that hasn’t happened.
I’m sixty-nine and I’ve seen a lot of things come and go, lots of change. I can’t say that things are weirder now than they were in the past.
Yeah that’s the problem. Postwar America has been unnaturally stable, precisely for the generation who still runs things: the Baby Boomers. Tyler Cowen says that “virtually all of us have been living in a bubble “outside of history,” and on this I agree with him. “Boomer Realism”—the continued cultural power of this aging generation—papers over just how radical the changes of the past two decades (really, decade and a half) have been.
Commenter J-D takes the opposite tack:
As far as I can tell, ‘things feel weird’ is something which has been true in every period of history, because ‘things keep changing’ is something which has been true in every period of history. That’s what things do: they change.
Of course this change is different from other changes, because changes are always different from other changes.
I don’t think that a single quantitative argument could ever be dispositive here. The amount of “change” is a high-dimensional and amorphous concept, unevenly spread between people, generations, countries, and every possible demographic. If you happen to think that “things are normal”—and if you’re uninterested in the fact that other people think that “things are weird”—then I recommend you stop reading this article and go enjoy the normal world.
Acknowledging the impossibility of proving the point quantitatively, there are historical parallels which can inform how we think.
We’ve experienced “rapid technological change” before. The Industrial Revolution is often considered to be a pretty big deal, though the effects certainly weren’t felt as widely as quickly. The Second Industrial Revolution—the period from 1870 to 1914—had a much larger impact. With innovations like electrification, industrialization, mass communication, the telegraph, the railroad, oil and steel, the daily life of most Europeans and Americans became unrecognizable in two generations.
But so what happened then? Did things proceed more or less normally, except that everyone was richer, had more free time and cheaper TVs or phonographs or whatever? Did people think that things were normal?
No. That’s not what happened. This led immediately to WW1 and then the Nazis, to the Russian Revolution and then Communism. In Europe, at least, the weirdness from technological change was undeniable.
But nothing like that really happened in the United States. I’m increasingly convinced that the contemporary American historical perspective is unique in its sense of continuity, a story that goes something like this:
«Veni vidi vici — we achieved our manifest destiny, according to the plan laid out by the Founding Fathers and through the dedicated application of our spirit of self-reliance, hard work, and technological progress. We’ve got professional baseball records that go back to the 1890s, and presidential biographies that go back much farther, with no sense of a dramatic historical break. The exception, the Civil War, has been neatly historicized as the second Founding, a necessary but circumscribed effort to solve the one little issue in the Founder’s vision.»
This longer historical perspective reinforces the experience of Boomer Realism, I think; a lot of this narrative emerged specifically in the postwar era in which they were raised.
But even though the US avoided radical change, it’s useful to go back and see what the vibe was at the end of the Second Industrial Revolution. Walter Lippmann’s first major book, Drift and Mastery, provides an excellent overview.
The thesis is that the scope of the world has dramatically expanded, that this new world demands more and different things of us and of our relationships.
We are unsettled to the very roots of our being. There isn’t a human relation, whether of parent and child, husband and wife, worker and employer, that doesn’t move in a strange situation…There are no precepts to guide us, no wisdom that wasn’t made for a simpler age. We have changed our environment more quickly than we know how to change ourselves.
Graeber and Wengrow’s The Dawn of Everything makes the anthropological case that human society is almost infinitely variable, that are more ways of collectively organizing ourselves and of individually fitting into a collective than we can fathom, from our thoroughly modern position. But individual humans, embedded in societies inherited from the past and constrained by the mortal cycle of aging and death, are not infinitely malleable.
This, then, is my qualitative case for when things feel weird. When we change our environments faster than we can change ourselves, we are necessarily living in an alien environment. And that feels weird.
For Lippmann, this was happening for the first time. He very clearly sees 1914 as anomalous, as the culmination of dramatic changes and expansions that have pushed existing institutions to their breaking point. But he’s still, at this point, optimistic that human ingenuity will be able to rise to the task.
Indeed, what he sees as democracy’s greatest hope is an empirical, pragmatic solution, coming from the “science of administration.”
Yet it is not very helpful to insist that size is a danger, unless you can specify what size…The ideal unit may fall somewhere between? Where? That is a problem which experiments alone can decide, experiments conducted by experts in the new science of administration.
Lippmann, 110 years ago, saw this experimental democracy as the only solution to the dysfunction caused by large-scale technological, social and economic change—and was looking forward to what we would come up with.
Stafford Beer, 50 years ago, spent his career developing exactly these techniques, and desperately tried to get everyone to listen. He thought there was still time to install an architecture of effective governance, to use modern communication and computation technology to allow society to adapt as quickly as we have changed our environment.
This didn’t happen, of course. Our “ship of state” is still being steered with 18th-century technology — and it is manifestly unable to maintain any coherent bearing amidst the maelstrom of a 21st-century technological environment.
With our highest level of social organization so manifestly useless, lower units bear the strain of adaptation. Our meso-level institutions are also losing their capacity — everything from education to media to health care and housing — which in turn leaves individual people and their intimate relations as the only mechanism for adaptation.
So many of the Millennial cohortmates are desperately scrambling to hold themselves together, to grasp fragments of the social past and technological present to shore against their ruin.
Or less poetically, to accomplish enough professionally, financially, socially and romantically to achieve the once-standard goal of homeownership, marriage, parenthood and community.
Many are falling through the cracks. Gender-segregated online communities are the refuge of the miserable, and they at least provide the comfort of someone else to blame. The platforms deserve plenty of blame, but at the end of the day, Facebook is other people.
Meanwhile, at the top level, we are witnessing a multi-year car crash, watching in horror but unable to do anything to stop the octogenarian-in-chief from sailing our ship of state straight into a hideously loud, orange iceberg. The “radical new idea” proposed today by Ezra Klein is a return to the electoral institutions of the 1960s.
American culture is premised on progress. This culture has delivered, when it comes to technological progress—though far more in terms of bits than atoms, of late, and recent “AI” trends seem likely to further exacerbate this gap. But our political and social institutions have not progressed. So, we drift.
Like Beer’s insistence of designing a machine whose output is liberty, Lippmann has no patience for celebrating the simple overthrow of the past:
What nonsense it is, then, to talk of liberty as if it were a happy-go-lucky breaking of chains…the iconoclasts didn’t free us. They threw us into the water, and now we have to swim.
In a real sense it is an adventure. We have still to explore the new scale of human life which digital technology has thrust upon us. We have still to invent ways of dealing with it. Of course, people shudder and beg to be let off in order to go back to the simpler life for which they were trained. Of course, they hope that competition will automatically produce the social results they desire.
Later Lippmann will of course abandon this optimism in favor of technocratic elite governance as the only viable method for governing a country so vast, populous and dynamic. And honestly, given the information-technological constraints of the 1920s, he might have been right. But we have the internet, and cybernetics, and more compute than anyone dreamed possible. The only way to save democracy is not to reify our quill-and-parchment 18th-century institutions but to invent a 21st century democracy.
For the real Lippmann heads, here’s a bunch of fun quotes from 1914 that still struck me as relevant today.
News: We are blown hither and thither like litter before the wind. Our days are lumps of undigested experience. You have only to study what newspapers regard as news to see how we are torn and twisted by the irrelevant: in frenzy about issues that do not concern us, bored with those that do.
Clickbait: It is said that the muckrakers played for circulation, as if that proved their insincerity. But the mere fact that muckraking was what people wanted to hear is in many ways the most important revelation of the whole campaign.
Conspiracy Theories: It is possible to work yourself into a state where the world seems a conspiracy and your daily going is best with an alert and tingling sense of labyrinthine evil.
Cancel Culture: There must be some ground for this sudden outburst of candor, some ground beside a national desire for abstract truth and righteousness. These charges and counter-charges arose because the world has been altered radically, not because Americans fell in love with honesty. If we condemn what we once honored, if we brand as criminal the conventional acts of twenty years ago, it’s because we have developed new necessities and new expectations.
Urban Alienation: I might possibly treat my neighbor as myself, but in this vast modern world the greatest problem that confronts me is to find me neighbor and treat him at all. The size and intricacy which we have to deal with have done more than anything else, I imagine, to wreck the simple generalizations of our ancestors.
Left/Liberal Divide: To expect unionists then to talk with velvet language, and act with the deliberation of a college faculty is to be a tenderfoot, a victim of your class tradition.
MAGA: [Woodrow Wilson writes]: “restore our politics to their full spiritual vigor again, and our national life…to its purity, its self-respect, and its pristine strength and freedom”
Office Life: He spends his time in an office where he deals the day long with papers and telephones, the symbols and shadows of events.
The Reactionary Impulse: Though [the reactionary] remedy is, I believe, altogether academic, their diagnosis does locate the spiritual problem. We have lost authority. We are ’emancipated’ from an ordered world. We drift.
Incel-ism: Life can be swamped by sex very easily if sex is not normally satisfied.
{ 45 comments }
PatinIowa 02.16.24 at 8:21 pm
I think you’re missing Commenter Bob’s point.
As a boomer, I vividly remember the late sixties and the seventies. Things felt really, really weird. (I can’t resist: “When things get weird, the weird go pro.”)
My intuition is that every cohort in almost every human society grows up weirded out by it all, whether digging roots on the savanna, or ordering a movie to stream from Amazon. And that the multitude of ways of ordering societies has more to do with the fact that we’re hardwired to be out of sorts and anxious in ways that simply can’t be completely soothed. After all, there really are leopards on the savanna and data aggregators at Amazon, and what happens to the complacent is often very ugly.
One case in point. When I was filling out my application for CO status with the Selective Service Agency in 1971, my mom said to me, “You know, I don’t think it’s ever been harder to be a young person than now.”
The month my dad graduated high school, Germany invaded the Soviet Union.
But what do I know? I’m going to read some more about the Black Death.
notGoodenough 02.16.24 at 9:07 pm
A random thought:
POSIWID is a useful tool which allows us to ignore the more nebulous “intent” and “purpose” in long-running systems so that we may instead focus on “function”. On the other hand, it should not eliminate the understanding that people design systems that have unintended side effects (with increasing complexity increasing that likelihood). For me, the key point is that, after they have been identified, it is when those side effects are allowed to continue (or even exploited) that they are likely to become (at least in part) the intended purpose of the system. In short, I would argue that purpose is a subjective relationship with system – and it is utility with both intended and unintended features. This might, I think, be a useful point when considering any system – particularly for a machine who’s (supposed?) “purpose” is to output liberty but who’s “function” fails to deliver.
Evan H. 02.16.24 at 9:30 pm
Beautifully argued piece.
In case it’s useful, feels connected to an argument I tried to string together years ago about why the narrators in utopian fiction mostly choose not to stay in utopia. Essentially…they can’t change fast enough to make it utopian for them. That takes generations.
Alex SL 02.16.24 at 10:22 pm
That gap is called liberalism: a period of drift and doubt.
That is an entirely new definition of liberalism that I have never heard of before. I wonder if any liberals would agree that their political movement and ideology are really a period?
But we’ve had technological change before! some object. And things turned out fine!
No, they did not. The introduction of cars has been catastrophic. I was recently made aware that cars have killed three times as many Americans as have been killed in all wars with US involvement combined, including the country’s civil war. Now, this won’t be true for countries like Russia or Poland, but it shows that organising societies around car ownership is a disaster comparable at least to a constant, century-long insurrectionist civil war of random bombings and assassinations across the entire planet. The accompanying CO2 emissions will, of course, likely collapse our society into a dark age. Things have turned out very badly already, so it isn’t even necessary to point out that everything having gone okay so far would at any rate be no guarantee that every future technological change will go equally well.
Our “ship of state” is still being steered with 18th-century technology — and it is manifestly unable to maintain any coherent bearing amidst the maelstrom of a 21st-century technological environment.
As far as I can tell, the core problem isn’t that our ship of state is being steered with 18th century technology, but that the ascendancy of neoliberalism has led to people assuming that it should not be steered at all, that it is best to simply take the hands off the wheel and watch passively while The Market in its wisdom steers us into an iceberg. “Because if we use the steering wheel, that would be communism, and communism has been shown not to work!” There is no reason to assume, however, that available administrative technology couldn’t have produced and enforced laws phasing out carbon, breaking up or nationalising monopolies like Microsoft or Amazon, outlawing private ownership of mass media, or raising the top marginal tax rate to 90% before it was too late. It was merely a question of will.
Conversely, what does it even mean to speak of 21st century democracy? Whether mediated through web services or a physical assembly on the forum of your city, there is a relatively limited set of possibilities how to translate the will of the public at large into policy decisions. Representative democracy with or without strict mandates, or plebiscites. Am I missing anything? It doesn’t matter if the plebiscite is done with letters or via email. All of these options have known failure modes, and neither of them makes a difference if the electorate is complacent about the iceberg.
hix 02.17.24 at 12:50 am
The short thesis would be things are more weird than in the past in the US (everywhere?) because of AI or however you want to call that, social media and stuff like that?
I’ll stick with rising inequality as the dominant force. But yes, I’d say people 15–20 years younger than me also look more weird than can be explained by the age difference and normal age cohort effects, or the weird observer observing non-representative changing samples for that matter. Albeit, there’s covid too, not just Instagram and TikTok. Never thought I would miss all relevant information running through Facebook, now they partially seem to run through WhatsApp and Instagram, but mostly not all, when the core user base is in that age cohort mentioned above.
John Q 02.17.24 at 5:25 am
It might be worth rereading Future Shock by the Tofflers, which made this kind of claim about the early 1970s.
What’s different about the current period is the combination of spectacular change in everything to do with IT and Communications with near-stasis in everything else. Apart from things with screens my household equipment is pretty much what I had when I first set up house fifty years ago. Fifty or even thirty years before that, I would have been lucky to have electricity and an indoor toilet, let alone fridge, washing machine, microwave etc. By contrast, the things I can do with my computer spectacularly exceed the visions of the SF I grew up with.
Agree with earlier commenters that the failure of neoliberalism is the proximate cause of our current discontents.
J-D 02.17.24 at 8:31 am
I observe that you’ve quoted me, but I’m not sure that you’ve understood me. That may be because I didn’t explain myself adequately. If I didn’t explain myself adequately, it may have been at least partly because I found the meaning of the earlier post I was commenting on to be obscure, and I know I wasn’t the only one! This post makes the ideas clearer than that one did, and prompts me to a different kind of response, one which I hope has some chance of making my meaning clearer than before. (If I understand the points being made in this post accurately, I remain of the opinion that ‘Things feel weird’ was a poor way of expressing your ideas. ‘Things feel weird’ is like ‘Fire burns’: of course it’s true, because it’s always true, but how does the observation help? Sure, everybody has to learn it for a first time, but isn’t everybody here already past that stage?)
Technological change affects people’s daily lives, the rate of technological change varies, and so the more rapid technological change the greater the upheaval in people’s daily lives. So far, so incontestable.
The assertion that the period between 1870 and 1914 was one of particularly rapid technological change (and therefore of particularly great upheaval in people’s daily lives) seems plausible (although I’m not an expert, and if the assertion were challenged by an expert I wouldn’t know how to defend it).
The assertion that recent decades have been ones of similarly rapid technological change is, I observe, partly challenged by John Quiggin; but he agrees that there has been very rapid technological change in some areas, and this would mean a lot of change in people’s daily lives in some respects. How that compares to the upheaval between 1870 and 1914, I can’t say.
The upheaval between 1870 and 1914 was followed by a hemoclysm, or even The Hemoclysm. Again, incontestable (although I point out again that ‘Things got weird’ would be a hopelessly inadequate way of summing up either what happened between 1870 and 1914 or what happened after 1914). The idea that there was a causal connection has a lot of surface plausibility but, again, if an expert challenged it I wouldn’t know how to defend it.
If there was a causal connection, then it suggests some risk that the upheaval of recent decades (even if it’s true that it was more limited in scope) could contribute to bringing about another hemoclysm (or Hemoclysm), and if there really is such a risk then it is obviously extremely important to guard against it.
All of the above applies to the whole world, or most of it, certainly including my own country and not just the USA; a substantial part of the post, however, is more specific to the USA (although it isn’t always clear which parts this is true of), and I have a comment on that as well.
The buffoonish hacks who wrote the US Constitution made a hash of the job, and the inadequate structure they created is malfunctioning particularly badly at the moment (although it seems to me that it’s not the first time). It would be a good thing if Americans could do something about that. In conclusion, however, to repeat myself again, although it’s true that it’s weird the way Donald Trump and the mob of dangerously disinhibited dimwits who make up his following have been enabled to threaten their country and the world with colossal and possibly even cataclysmic damage, it’s not the weirdness that’s the problem.
engels 02.17.24 at 12:34 pm
the combination of spectacular change in everything to do with IT and Communications with near-stasis in everything else
-variety and accessibility (to affluent) of food, including many foreign ingredients and cuisines which were unknown or considered exotic 50 years ago
-cost of manufactured goods, including clothing (which for the relatively affluent is essentially disposable)
-extremely low cost and convenience of long-distance air travel
Kevin Munger 02.17.24 at 7:05 pm
EvanH @ 3
Lippmann makes almost exactly this point near the end — that all of the “utopias” dreamed up by radicals tend to be static, that we can’t think of something that’s both perfect and changing.
JohnQ@ 6
I picked up Future Shock and yeah…I really agreed with it. Many of the specific examples didn’t pan out but overall I found it very compelling. Not sure how to square it with my thesis though — Brad DeLong says that 1874-the present has been the big anomaly in terms of sustained growth, so maybe it’s just always been weird!
J-D @ 7
and picking up on the thread raised by others — I think that much of the reason for the rise of neoliberalism was the failure to install effective governance beforehand. Markets genuinely have powerful information/communication properties, and they outperform bad, static, outdated government. Absent an actually functional, modern, cybernetic governance, powerful people will still find neoliberalism the best way to get what they want.
I disagree that founders were buffoonish hacks, though. It’s just suffering from success. https://kevinmunger.substack.com/p/its-about-time
LFC 02.17.24 at 9:43 pm
A minor point, but Drift and Mastery should probably be seen in the context of the young Lippmann’s Progressivism; the emphasis on the “new science of administration” (and on the role of experts) was, I think, a pretty standard Progressive theme. Btw I recommend (the late) Ronald Steel’s prize-winning Walter Lippmann and the American Century (1980), though it’s been a long time since I read it.
J-D 02.17.24 at 9:46 pm
There’s nothing unusual about buffoonish hacks being successful. I’m not surprised, though, by your disagreement: it must be difficult to break free of the influence of the grotesquely undeserved adulation conventionally lavished on them.
For the rest of your comment, it seems as if you agree with me that the US constitutional structure is functioning badly and that it would be good if Americans did something about this, although I gather no clear idea of what you think they should do. Maybe you don’t have any ideas about that: fair enough, I don’t either.
nastywoman 02.17.24 at 10:02 pm
and we did some ‘sinking’ as to a certain extent our moms have already told US –
‘that the pace of technological change is intolerable, that it denies humans the dignity of continuity, states the competence to govern, and social scientists a society about which to accumulate knowledge’.
they just took our I-phones away.
And do you know how much that hurts?
Gareth Richard Samuel Wilson 02.18.24 at 1:15 am
“The introduction of cars has been catastrophic. I was recently made aware that cars have killed three times as many Americans as have been killed in all wars with US involvement combined, including the country’s civil war. ”
How many lives have been saved by ambulances?
Phil H 02.18.24 at 9:41 am
“The buffoonish hacks who wrote the US Constitution made a hash of the job”
Whatever metric for success you apply to a national constitution, the first thing it has to do is survive in use; the US constitution has done that better than almost any other.
Criticise the document all you want, but its success is a fact of history that has to be reckoned with: whatever features you might wish for in a constitution/constitutional order, it would have to reproduce that success at least.
Alex SL 02.18.24 at 12:39 pm
Gareth etc,
The problem isn’t having a car, the problem is organising the entire society and economy around personal car ownership. Now you could say, so it isn’t technological progress that is the problem, it is how we use it. Quite so, but I was responding to “But we’ve had technological change before! some object. And things turned out fine!” Technological change doesn’t imply an invention in isolation, but the changes it brings at a societal level.
As for the question how many lives ambulances have saved, that is the best cherry that can be picked, but one may want to ask how many lives petrol-fueled cars will have saved if our current trajectory continues of only ever slightly and very temporarily reducing carbon emissions during global economic crises. The answer will likely be minus several billion, as a planet >5C warmer will likely feed at best half the current world population.
steven t johnson 02.18.24 at 4:00 pm
Re the minor kerfuffle on “buffoonish hacks.”
Sorry but the defense of the Framers* is incorrect. The criticism @7 may be that the Constitution is not working well today, but after 235 years more or less, that’s to be expected. It is merely ungenerous to insult them for not being able to see the future and defy the power of time.
But the thing is, they were hacks, despite having so many lawyers. The Eleventh Amendment was necessary as soon as 1794 to clarify the role of the federal judicial system. You would think a bunch of lawyers could draft at least the court system’s basic jurisdictions, wouldn’t you?
And as for success, these geniuses (yes, sarcasm) managed to write in a crisis as early as 1800, after a mere twelve years, again solely because they couldn’t write a clear clause. That’s why the Twelfth Amendment had to be passed.
The mystifying question of why their work is deemed successful has no good answer. The whole thing collapsed in savage violence by 1861, but the preliminary crises as early as 1820 had pointed to this debacle. Those of you who have not seen the arguments that the Civil War Amendments are not genuinely constitutional and legal have been fortunate. But I think even those who wholeheartedly approve of the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments can agree that could as well be called Second Revolution Amendments. They wouldn’t have been passed without the conquest of the CSA, which I have no problem conceding. But I also have to concede that the Constitution after these amendments was not the Framers’ Constitution. The previous amendments were merely attempts to fix bungles in Philly.
*Kindle recently had a sale on a Gerald Horne book, the Counterrevolution of 1776. It was dirt cheap but I find myself reluctant to start even so. If Horne thinks 1776 was a counterrevolution, what in God’s name could the Convention be? The triumph of fascism? I still think the Framers were the equivalent of the Directory in France, people dedicated to resolving the threat of revolution while somehow hanging on the some of its previous fruits, at least insofar as they had fallen to the right sort of people. It wasn’t till after the completion of the American Revolution (aka the war of 1812) that another wave of democratization swept over the country…but even that immediately ran into problems in Missouri!
engels 02.18.24 at 4:36 pm
City life before the motorcar ruined everything:
By 1880, there were at least a hundred and fifty thousand horses living in New York, and probably a great many more. Each one relieved itself of, on average, twenty-two pounds of manure a day, meaning that the city’s production of horse droppings ran to at least forty-five thousand tons a month. George Waring, Jr., who served as the city’s Street Cleaning Commissioner, described Manhattan as stinking “with the emanations of putrefying organic matter.” Another observer wrote that the streets were “literally carpeted with a warm, brown matting . . . smelling to heaven.” In the early part of the century, farmers in the surrounding counties had been happy to pay for the city’s manure, which could be converted into rich fertilizer, but by the later part the market was so glutted that stable owners had to pay to have the stuff removed, with the result that it often accumulated in vacant lots, providing breeding grounds for flies. The problem just kept piling up until, in the eighteen-nineties, it seemed virtually insurmountable. One commentator predicted that by 1930 horse manure would reach the level of Manhattan’s third-story windows.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2009/11/16/hosed
Whirrlaway 02.18.24 at 4:48 pm
What is bothersome about the present is cultural change, of which technological change is synecdoche. What’s new about the present from this 78 year perspective is that the horizon for tolerable change has shrunk to less than a generation, and “tradition” has been replaced by “creative destruction” (and y’all can get off my lawn, verily). If it doesn’t spark joy in the concerned individual out it goes.
Here from the WaPo this morning is the past disappearing before your eyes:
“The 66th running of the Daytona 500 has been postponed until Monday afternoon for the first time since 2012.” A dozen years ago is Historic, a quaint note in the dusty record, beyond living experience.
LFC 02.18.24 at 7:13 pm
steven t. johnson @16
Didn’t the Framers face the following choice: Have disunion over slavery in 1789, or have it later? Given that they wanted not only union but a stronger central government than the Articles of Confederation had provided, they chose to not confront the slavery issue. Although this decision was not “progressive” or in tune with the Enlightenment belief in natural rights held by many of them, given their basic aims and the context, it was a rational choice for them, indeed at that point perhaps the only one.
Andrew Hamilton 02.18.24 at 8:08 pm
I think that people are overthinking all this, though I’m not entirely clear on what the topic is and what is being overthought. There was something about algorithms and now click-bait…
For what it’s worth, if you regularly clear your browser history, turn off all notifications, have a way to easily toggle JavaScript, and ad-block judiciously, and stay away from click-bait unless you really want to see the celebrity side-boob, you can party on the internet as if it were still 1963. Every “app” I’ve found useful can open to a minimalist page, with modest inveiglements to make yourself better known, and you can chose what you want to read or hear or look at without direct intercession from the Man. It helps if you had the wisdom to realize that involving yourself in bird-themed post-it-note programs was going to be counterproductive, and if you are too worn out to learn to type with your thumbs.
About the only place where algorithmic suggestions are unavoidable are on movie-streaming programs and Kindle but, talk about weird, those are so off-the-wall they are mere passing annoyances, and with practice you can click right past them. And, OK, there’s a lot of rubble on Amazon, but burrowing past it is easier than getting on the electric scooter and riding to the mall.
Sorry if this is off topic. I’m the same age as Trump and Bill Clinton and little Bush, maybe a bit addle-pated, and have possibly too effectively walled myself off from the tides of technology that are supposed to be directing society.
J-D 02.18.24 at 9:35 pm
Lasting for a long time is not an indicator of merit.
engels 02.18.24 at 10:36 pm
Review of the Horne book:
https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/07/03/the-racist-counter-revolution-of-1776/
J-D 02.19.24 at 2:02 am
At the time (this is not hindsight), there were people who did not want a stronger central government. The people who wanted a stronger central government won, and we now live in the world that resulted from their victory, but that does not prove they were right.
However, even if they were right in wanting a stronger central government, that wouldn’t prove that the way they did it was good.
TM 02.19.24 at 11:58 am
Kevin: “Brad DeLong says that 1874-the present has been the big anomaly in terms of sustained growth”
The last 150 years have been an absolute anomaly in human history and we don’t have to resort to vague subjective feeling of “weirdness” or disputed accounts of technological change to come to this conclusion. It’s enough to look at a chart of population growth (e. g. https://ourworldindata.org/population-growth-over-time) and remember that human material culture has grown even more rapidly than raw population. For thousands of years, the human footprint on the planet did not or only very gradually change. Economic and technologic change happened but most generations pre 1800 would hardly have noticed those changes during their lifetimes. After about 1800, the rate of growth increased to unprecedented levels and is still historically high even though the growth rate has been falling for 60 years. The change we have experienced in our own lifetimes due to sheer growth, population and stuff wise, is staggering. This must have had profound implications for society even without taking into account technological change.
“I think that much of the reason for the rise of neoliberalism was the failure to install effective governance beforehand.”
You’d have to explain how you measure effective governance. This thesis seems like another “things just feel that way” theory that you’ll have a hard time to substantiate. Another problem is that you seem to assume the state as an actor independent of Capital, which it clearly isn’t. Neoliberal economic reforms where initiated by governments in coordination with capital interests.
steven t johnson 02.19.24 at 3:29 pm
LFC@19 “Didn’t the Framers face the following choice: Have disunion over slavery in 1789, or have it later?” If you’re asking whether a central government that could have relied on majority rule (rather than supermajorities) to compensate slave owners heedless of their previous property rights would have been cheaper in lives and money than the Civil War? Why, yes. A unicameral legislature like Pennsylvania’s in the unruly revolutionary times could in principle have applied.
But I think I already pointed out that almost everyone else here thinks the non-revolutionary settlements like the Directory (or even Napoleon) or pretty much anything is better than revolution, which is always an evil. When push comes to shove, it’s the outcome of 1848 that is preferred to the Paris Commune.
But although I think that should have been your question, I don’t think it was. For my part, I think that national unity is an indispensable part of the self-determination of peoples. [This refutes J-D@23, by the way, plus there was the extremely high probability that continued disunity would have indeed resulted in wars. Also, the notion that long periods of peace cannot be held to be good, is remarkable, but not in a good way.] Unlike Gerald Horne, I am not a born-again British imperialist (I am open to revising this assessment after I get around to his book, mind you.) So, yes, taking whole colonies away from the British Empire is also a progressive step. And expropriating that much property is definitely revolutionary to boot.
The incontestable fact that democracy is entirely compatible with conquest doesn’t mean democracy then wasn’t still more progressive than most other countries, most of which were cursed with time-honored forms of class rule that openly defied the real equality (a perverse opinion but it’s mine) of citizens. The pretense democracy back then was all a sham is a sham today, the pretense democracy is going to be done right now. The subtext, the part not said aloud is, democracy is better than socialism. Or so I see it.
engels@22 The review suggests that Horne can’t even distinguish between the Founders (the revolutionaries, by the way) and the Framers. I strongly disagree with this as disoriented. The reviewer seems to think that the lands conquered from the original inhabitants are not capital accumulation. Whether the reviewer or Horne, this is absurd. The notion that the British Empire was about to compensate the entire slaveholding class of the empire, both on the mainland and the West Indies, is an astounding counterfactual, not a genuine issue. The Mansfield decision didn’t even free Scottish coal miners and saltmakers (see Michael Perelman, The Invention of Capitalism, if you must.)
It should be wondered that anyone should ever think that the southern slaveholders were eager revolutionaries. They did not begin the revolution. The only theater of war where Loyalists actually fielded significant forces against the revolution was in the South. The greatest concentrations of Loyalism in the North was in the cities of New York and Philadelphia. As best as I can tell that was because even then they were entrepots and financial centers for slaveholders.
The cheap shot is that Horne was a Stalinist hack for years and now that he’s a born-again (British) imperialist he’s still a hack. But eventually I will read the book and decide for myself.
hix 02.19.24 at 6:26 pm
“For what it’s worth, if you regularly clear your browser history, turn off all notifications, have a way to easily toggle JavaScript, and ad-block judiciously, and stay away from click-bait unless you really want to see the celebrity side-boob, you can party on the internet as if it were still 1963.”
Not that easy, even for super rational actors with no risk of addiction type behaviour. If you are happily married, got all the friends you need and a save standardised job path at the same location, say in public administration or are retired, that works, even at a younger age. Now good luck, if you are for example a 20-year-old that just moved to another town for college, and try to avoid social media to pick the other extreme.
Phil H 02.19.24 at 8:06 pm
“ Lasting for a long time is not an indicator of merit.”
Arguable, but it’s a precondition for merit.
In the main topic, I rather agree with Andrew Hamilton above.
For example, the OP says: “We have still to explore the new scale of human life which digital technology has thrust upon us.” And I guess there’s still exploring to be done, but isn’t that point rather undercut by the following list of things that they were dealing with 100 years ago that are exactly the same as the shit we’re dealing with now? Like, plus ca change, plus c’est le meme chose? Instead of exploring the new scale, couldn’t we just fix the shitty things in front of us like food banks and Ukraine?
Stephen 02.19.24 at 10:25 pm
steven t johnson @ 25: “The Mansfield decision didn’t even free Scottish coal miners and saltmakers”.
Probably, that was because the Mansfield decision was in an English court, re a resident of England, and as per the Act of Union Scotland has a completely separate legal system.
Query: what was the constitutional position, pre-independence, of the colonial legal systems?
LFC 02.20.24 at 2:48 am
I think I need to clarify my comment @19. This is partly my fault, as I should have made clearer which particular remarks I was responding to.
In his comment @16, steven t. johnson wrote: “The mystifying question of why their [the Framers’] work is deemed successful has no good answer. The whole thing collapsed in savage violence by 1861, but the preliminary crises as early as 1820 had pointed to this debacle.” From these sentences, I drew the inference that steven t. johnson was suggesting that the original Constitution should be labeled a failure because it “collapsed” with secession and civil war in 1861.
I attempted to respond to this in my comment @19, but admittedly somewhat too cryptically. So I’ll try again. (It’s been a long time since I formally studied this period of U.S. history, so I’m sure this will be oversimplified and schematic, but at least clearer, I hope, than my previous comment.)
The framers of the Constitution wanted to replace the Articles of Confederation with something else.
In deciding what the replacing document should look like, they faced choices w.r.t. how to deal with slavery. Putting specifics to one side, the basic choice istm was to mention it in some way, or not. Except for an indirect mention in the three-fifths clause, the Framers chose not to mention slavery but to glide over it in silence.
This deferral of the issue perhaps contributed to its festering and to its finally ending in secession, but it’s not clear that this result was avoidable, and specifically not clear that it could have been avoided in 1789 had the Framers tried to address the slavery issue.
So they chose a path that allowed them to agree on a new Constitution, something that might not have been possible had they tried to tackle the slavery issue at the time.
In this sense, secession and civil war in 1861 is not necessarily evidence of the Framers’ failure, but rather evidence of their understandable decision to defer the issue in the interest of successfully replacing the Articles of Confederation with something else. They swept the issue of slavery under the rug in order to accomplish what they took to be their main goal.
That doesn’t mean they necessarily did a great job with the Constitution. It is tilted rather far, perhaps even for its time, in a countermajoritarian direction (e.g., the composition and indirect election [as it was originally set out] of the Senate). What it does mean, I would suggest, is that, given the intractability of the slavery issue and its potential to divide the states, the Framers made an understandable choice to put the whole thing off. Whether that choice was the right one in retrospect, normatively or otherwise, is highly debatable, but I don’t think one can assert as if it’s obvious that the advent of civil war in 1861 meant that the Framers “failed.” A reasonable argument can be made that civil conflict was going to erupt over slavery sooner or later (whether the Civil War was inevitable used to be a much-debated historiographical question, but there is at least an argument to be made that it was). If civil conflict at some point was indeed unavoidable, then the Framers’ decision to, in effect, put off that conflict to a future date by glossing over the issue of slavery in the Constitution becomes understandable. The impulse to defer divisive and difficult issues — to kick the can down the road — has certainly remained a feature of politics, and it’s hard to be too critical of people who yielded to this impulse as the Framers did, especially given the surrounding circumstances.
GMcK 02.20.24 at 3:34 am
OK, suppose that we agree that the US Constitution has outlived its capacity to deal with the scale and rate of change of the current nation. We’ve built an enormous administrative state and regulatory framework that tries to fill in where Congress is helpless. Or is that hopeless?
But the bureaucracy is itself struggling to keep up. The FAA’s air traffic control system still relies on an IBM mainframe and controllers pushing little “boats” with paper tickets on them. The IRS still runs batch jobs on its own mainframe with 100 tapedrives as far as I can tell, and has filled cafeterias with stacks of unprocessed returns because it can’t rent enough warehouse space, though free e-filing is finally being piloted in a handful of states. Federal agencies are at a loss to know who should be regulating self-driving cars.
But is any other country doing better? There have been scores of countries that have adopted newly designed constitutions since 1787. I don’t see any consensus on which of them are any better. Singapore, maybe? — but it’s such a unique case. US state officials have called for an Article V Constitutional Convention, but serious agendas are even rarer than calls for secession without an enabling Amendment. Where are the 21st century Lippmanns and Beers to propose solutions for our own time? Maybe our problem is that there are too many of them and nobody is able to rise above the background noise.
Or maybe the problem is more fundamental, and it’s simply that it’s impossible to distinguish between an unlimited exponential and the steep part of a logistic growth curve when you’re inside the system. If we’re on a hyperexponential trajectory, as singulatarians (remember them?) argue, then we might be past the singularity already, and the future is radically unpredictable.
Lack of an imaginable future might be the source of our present malaise. In the distant past, linear projection of stasis or slow change was feasible. More recently, our great*grandparents had “manifest destiny” and “the war to end all wars”. My childhood’s future was equipped with jetpacks and flying cars. Now all the options that we can foresee range from unpleasant to intolerable. It’s not the pace of change that’s distressing, it’s the range of possible outcomes. Sometimes I can see a way through, but the path is very narrow.
Alex SL 02.20.24 at 6:57 am
Regarding the constitutional arrangements of the USA, that is mostly for US Americans to decide. But my two cents are that I can understand that the writers of the US constitution were of their time, when equality implicitly only applied to wealthy white men, that they were flawed, which banal insight seems remarkable only because of so many Americans treat them like divinely inspired prophets, and that they made compromises that would turn out to only delay the consequences they were meant to avoid, because that is what humans do.
What I do not understand is why Americans consider it normal to not revise their constitution after over two centuries, when it clearly shows its age, and indeed treat it like a holy text to be interpreted by a quasi-priesthood instead of a malleable tool for pragmatically organising society.
Regarding manure, the alternative to organising society around cars, everybody being stuck in traffic, and potentially running over one’s own toddler while backing into the garage isn’t everybody owning a horse any more than the alternative is abolishing ambulances. The alternative is organising society around public transport and walkable cities. And maybe everybody owning a bicycle.
It is astonishing what gut reactions are provoked by the fairly obvious observation that mass ownership of cars is harmful to humanity and the world as a whole. The starting point here was the claim that technological change has never had a significant downside, that any concerns about the effects of any new technology ever have historically been misguided. Can’t we even acknowledge the problems of combustion engines and two-hour commutes?
J-D 02.20.24 at 9:25 am
No, it’s not.
Kevin Munger 02.20.24 at 9:31 am
GMcK —
That’s the margin I’m trying to work on!
And I think that the range of outcomes is downstream of the pace of change — both the hardnosed projection of outcomes and the ability of more speculative types to envision better futures.
steven t johnson 02.20.24 at 2:49 pm
Stephen@28 points out that the Mansfield decision applied to England proper, as if I didn’t cite this fact to highlight how absurd it is to claim the Mansfield decision was the imminent threat to slavery in the colonies, so grave a threat it prompted a preventive counterrevolution. But I suppose if you are a true contrarian, you can’t agree with someone as dubious as me on the smallest issue. It’s others who seem to think Mansfield could apply elsewhere, even in the face of local positive law supporting slavery.
“Query: what was the constitutional position, pre-independence, of the colonial legal systems?” Highly varied, to say the least. That’s why it is even harder to see how Mansfield, which didn’t even apply in Scotland, could apply to the colonies with their varied systems. The efforts to use English courts to decide American legal issues were bitterly resented and hard fought since at least the days of—not Mansfield—but the Stamp Act of 1765.
LFC’s defense of the Framers omits the incompetence revealed by the lousy legal drafting by a bunch of lawyers that resulted in the immediate need for amendments, including one clarifying the legal jurisdiction of courts in suits against the states. Again, the first constitutional crisis was in 1800, a mere twelve years later. (And yes, there was some hot talk of overthrowing the wrong government by force.)
One of the primary forces driving the Framers was fear of state debt relief and paper money, which is why both impairment of contracts and paper money is forbidden to the states. This is not especially admirable, even if one may make a plausible case that it was a price for national unity in a period when no other solutions had been pioneered, when the state of the productive forces simply did not allow some remarkable anticipation of the twentieth century welfare state or whatever.
As to the defense of the Framers as simply kicking the can down the road in regard to slavery, the first great crisis over slavery came as early as 1820, when men who were in their prime in 1788 could wail about the “firebell in the night.” Every attempt to kick the can down the road ending up making the cost of ending slavery higher. Yes, it’s human, but as Alex SL knows, there is an extraordinary tendency to treat the Framers as prophets and the Constitution as the Tablets from Sinai. Best I think not to give succor to this faction.
steven t johnson 02.20.24 at 2:53 pm
There are no walkable cities in rural areas. If there were, they wouldn’t be rural. I suppose there is something charming about a seventy biking over two large hills to get to a movie theater thirty miles away, though.
Francis Spufford 02.20.24 at 8:39 pm
Hang on a minute: I cannot resist pointing out, as someone who till recently was operating a whole imaginary American city in the 1920s, that in between the era of horse manure and the era of the petrol car came an era of electrification that lasted several decades. New York City stank maximally of horseshit in 1880, because the first electric tramway in the United States wasn’t built until two or three years later. By 1900 there were thousands upon thousands of miles of tramway, and a burgeoning and densifying network of ‘interurbans’ joining US cities, even (or maybe especially) in parts of the country like the Midwest which would later be confidently declared to be inherently unsuited to transit. Hundreds of thousands of people were being moved daily at speeds up to 45mph. The interurban network reached its zenith in the early 20s, and then declined under competition from the car – and car manufacturers were often directly involved in taking over and closing down tram and interurban operators. There’s nothing technologically inevitable about the automobile-moulded landscape that the United States has now.
engels 02.20.24 at 8:50 pm
It’s ironic that the “walkable cities” agenda gets lumped in with pro-cycling, when ime cyclists, specifically pavement cyclists and especially but not exclusively Deliveroo etc are the number one factor making walking in cities like London hell a lot of the time now.
Stephen 02.20.24 at 9:07 pm
steven t johnson@34
Oh dear. You don’t seem to understand that when I wrote that the Mansfield decision applied to England proper, not Scotland, I was agreeing with you, before enquiring how far the Scottish legal situation applied to other places. You seem to believe that I am “a true contrarian, [who] can’t agree with someone as dubious as me on the smallest issue.” Piffle.
Now, it is true that we have disagreed on other issues: most notably, if I remember rightly, as to whether your political opponents should be sent to some sort of Gulag equivalent. I would indeed regard such a belief as dubious. But on the matter of legal enforcement of the emancipation of slaves, I would value further information. As I understand it, the slaves in the British West Indies were set free by an Act of the Westminster Parliament, overriding any concerns of the local legislatures, though the execution of that Act did vary from one place to another. If Westminster had tried to do the same for the American colonies, there would undoubtedly have been strong opposition; but the question is, did the power to attempt emancipation on that way exist? If it did, were not the American slaveholders right to fear that it might be used?
By the way, I also don’t know how the enslavement of white Scots miners and salt-workers by other Scots was ended. Not, as far as I know, by a Scottish legal case or by an Act of the UK Parliament. Any information?
steven t johnson 02.20.24 at 11:59 pm
Stephen@38 tells me he meant to agree with me. The comment asked a question about how the English parliament and courts could in fact address slavery in colonial parts, given that they did abolish slavery with compensation against the local will and local laws. (The Mansfield decision hinged on the absence of positive law of slavery in England proper.) Again, before outright battles in Massachusetts, English courts tried to take jurisdiction in smuggling cases, potentially requiring defendants to be transported to England to make their case. The rebellious but not yet violent resistance left this a dead letter. The revolution began long before Lord Dunmore.
The implication of asking the question was to take seriously the possibility that Mansfield might have been a serious threat and correctly seen as such by the slaveholders. As in, maybe the legal jurisdictions put something to it. I still say all this talk is a flight of fancy, London was trying to extract revenue, not spend it. I daresay even Nicholas Guyatt on some level already knows this. Plus of course, Stephen didn’t say, I agree or that’s right or even tell it to the NYT. Instead, Stephen is still “asking” irrelevant leading questions, except this time saying where they are meant to lead. There is indeed a smell of piffle. Somehow I think Stephen still won’t agree with me.
Just in case the question about the end of Scottish bondage (children weren’t born slaves, so in that sense it wasn’t slavery, they merely could not leave and had to wear “collars engraves with their master’s name…”) My source, Perelman, says a law of 1774, meant to keep the bondsmen from running away to England (for lower wages it seems) by moderating the system, was apparently ineffective. Perelman by the way quotes from the preamble to support his account of the law’s motivation. Like the Declaration of Independence, sometimes the reasons given are proffered for appearances and played no role prior. Then, Perelman merely says the whole system wasn’t officially ended until 1799.
As for the Gulag…let’s skip the cheap anti-Communist retro stylings and hypothesize about an imaginary place called “Belmarsh.” I must say I think putting someone into “Belmarsh” for lying would be less reprehensible than putting someone in “Belmarsh” for telling the truth. So there’s a confession for you. It’s not much of a confession because I don’t really have opponents, being argumentative, even rude, to me is just a display of virtue, no? Hardly makes someone an opponent of me, much less the state which would operate “Belmarsh.”
Alex SL 02.21.24 at 12:07 am
Francis Spufford,
Exactly; these are choices. In fairness, some choices are forced upon an actor. For example, the technological change wrought by gunpowder was effectively unavoidable, because sooner or later not being on par with neighbours in weapons technology becomes a problem. But what energy technologies to invest in, what transport networks to build, how to regulate media ownership and disinformation, how to organise secondary education, what electoral system to implement, whether to allow subcontracting and gig work culture to exist, how to regulate intellectual property in AI training, in all those cases different paths would have been or are still available. This means that one can look at a path actually taken and conclude that the “some (who) object(ed)” at the time may have been right about it being the worse one, that things didn’t “turn out alright”.
I had not realised, however, how deeply ingrained car culture is even in this community, how easy it is even for highly educated and smart people to think that the arrangements that they grew into are the only possible ones, and every other arrangement is unthinkable, even when it is to a large degree realised in other countries right now. I am vaguely reminded of Medieval people who modelled everything after feudal hierarchies, from their view of how heaven and hell are organised to their classifications of biodiversity and chemistry.
TM 02.21.24 at 10:57 am
engels: “cyclists … are the number one factor making walking in cities like London hell a lot of the time now” The SUVs using up 95% of the public space are not the problem, it’s the bikes forced to share the remaining 5% with walkers that are the problem? What a snobbish bullshit.
You do realize that “pro-cycling” emphatically does NOT mean cycling on sidewalks but to the contrary means giving some of the excessive space taken up by automobiles to cyclists by turing it into a network of safe bikelanes?
engels 02.21.24 at 10:59 am
Fwiw I don’t think cars are the only way of organising transport and I don’t like them much personally, I’d just like to be a bit less starry-eyed about the alternatives than some of their advocates (not necessarily anyone here).
Stephen 02.21.24 at 12:48 pm
steven t johnson @38
Look, I have always agreed with you on one point. Lord Mansfield’s declaration that the laws of England forbade slavery on English soil did not, and could not, forbid slavery in Scotland or in the overseas colonies. I cannot see how you ever thought I denied that; other than a belief, which I would call slightly paranoid, that since I disagree with you about some things I must disagree about everything.
But equally, another indisputable fact is that the Westminster parliament could, and did, achieve something beyond the powers of any English legal judgement. They forbade slavery in the West Indian colonies, whatever the local assemblies thought of the matter.
Since that was constitutionally possible, the fears of the American slaveholders that their slaves might eventually be freed by Westminster were not, I think, entirely imaginary; and Mansfield’s judgement was surely an indication that English public opinion was moving against slavery, and even in the eighteenth century that had some influence on Parliament; bad news for American slaveholders. I haven’t yet read Gerald Horne’s book, about which this subthread began, but I gather that may have been his argument. Correct me if I am wrong.
As for Scottish slavery: it turns out that this was also abolished by the Westminster Parliament, irrespective of Scottish law:
“An Act to explain and amend the Laws relative to Colliers in that Part of Great Britain called Scotland. [13th June 1799.] Whereas by the Statute Law of Scotland as explained by the Judges of the Courts of Law there, many Colliers, Coal-bearers, and Salters are in a state of slavery or bondage, bound to the Collieries and Salt-works where they work for life …”
Score one more for Parliamentary supremacy.
As for your incoherent rant about Belmarsh, which I suppose is something to do with the Assange extradition, I cannot see its relevance, other than as a display of your own self-satisfaction.
steven t johnson 02.21.24 at 3:52 pm
Stephen@43 “the fears of the American slaveholders that their slaves might eventually be freed by Westminster were not, I think, entirely imaginary…” But the irrelevance of a single judge in one jurisdiction lacking positive law enforcing slavery is precisely why the alleged fears of slaveholders (which by the way have never been documented to have been a real thing, rather than retroactive mindreading of the Slaver Collective Consciousness—that’s what I’ll be looking for in Horne when I get to it) are prima facie an absurd “cause” to allege. You have never agreed with me, it’s always been argumentative.
This disagreement is why you supposedly asked me for more information even when you already had the information available to you. Whether this was supposedly to catch me out on something somehow or in some way make you seem more informed is irrelevant. The slaveholders had zero reason to think Parliament was going to buy them out. My guess is that if Horne had actually successfully demonstrated otherwise, his book wouldn’t be on sale for $1.99 on Kindle. But eventually I’ll either find out for myself or die.
The reference to Assange exposes your commitment to suppressing opponents by police methods, I think. It is entirely relevant to your comment about my supposed commitment to the same principle you uphold. You’re the one who raised the issue. And the rebuttal wasn’t incoherent, you understood it perfectly, even if you resented the invitation to stand up for your alleged principle of not putting people into prison for telling the truth.
As near as I can make out, the motive for this is the desire to smear the American Revolution, precisely because it was a revolution. Quite aside from a visceral hate for revolution (not just your failing, I concede) the implicit idea is that “we” have now perfected ourselves and have the real perfect democracy. This is deeply reactionary in consequence. You personally might add that damaging it with even limited reforms aiming at social democracy is unwisdom bordering on the criminal and others might simply agree that revolutionary strategy and tactics and similar enormities are crimes to be fought with prisons, or maybe it’s vice versa? Doesn’t matter. Democracy of the American Revolution sort was a great thing in its day, but it’s day is past.
Stephen 02.21.24 at 8:03 pm
steven t johnson @34
Dear Mr Johnson, your paranoia is betraying you again. You write “You have never agreed with me, it’s always been argumentative”. Perhaps you mean I have never agreed with you about everything, which is perfectly true, but I can’t see why agreeing with you on some things and arguing against you on others is such a sin.
Then: “you supposedly asked me for more information even when you already had the information available to you”. Well no, I didn’t supposedly ask, I did really and genuinely ask about something I did not then know. Despairing of getting a useful answer from you, I today found a website dealing with Acts of Parliament that provided the answer, and quoted the relevant Act. Not your fault that you did not know about it either.
“The reference to Assange exposes your commitment to suppressing opponents by police methods, I think.” Strewth. The only thing I have written here about suppressing opponents by police methods was a disapproving reference to your earlier advocacy, as I remember it, of sending your opponents to a Gulag equivalent. I don’t know if you have noticed the irony of your also being deeply opposed to slavery (as I am).
“As near as I can make out, the motive for this is the desire to smear the American Revolution, precisely because it was a revolution.” Permit me to have some insight into my own motives. I regard most revolutions, even the Glorious Revolution of 1688 (as seen from a Scottish or Irish point of view) as involving serious injustices, and would always prefer peaceful and gradual constitutional reform. You are free to differ, in a way that I fear those who differ from you would not be if you had your way.
As for my supporting “the implicit idea … that “we” have now perfected ourselves and have the real perfect democracy”, dear God, what have I ever said that could lead you to that conclusion by anything remotely resembling logical thought? I should point out that, not being a US citizen, I am not part of your “we”, and I regard a system that elected the unique President Trump. and may re-elect him, as being very far from a real perfect democracy.
Comments on this entry are closed.