RoR: Forum

Post 0

Monday, November 10, 2003 - 7:11pm

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Roderick,

Just a couple of comments on your interesting article.

Without Augustine, there would have been no Aquinas.

And what would be wrong with that?

It is true, if Augustine had not set up the mystic basis for Roman Catholicism with his syncretistic amalgam of Manichaean paganism, Platonism, and Pauline theology, which would infect the world of reason for the next 1400 years (and still does), there no doubt would have been no Aquinas. But reality is reality, and in reality we unfortunately got both, with all the horrid consequences.

The only philosophers in history that made net positive contributions to philosophy were the following: Thales, Anaximander, Anaximenes, Aristotle, Peter Abelard, William of Ockham, Sir Francis Bacon, John Locke, Ayn Rand. Others made contributions, mostly negative, and all did far more harm than good. History, the world, and we would be better off without them.

And look at the anti-Muslim, pro-war hysteria that's sweeping the country these days.

You are not "anti-Muslim?" Does "anti-Muslim" mean "pro-war?" Are distinctions not important? Since you promote some things, "post-modernist," should we conclude your post is a "pro-post-modernist anti-Objectivist screed?" Or, is it possible these are different things?

One can be anti-War and anti-Muslim, but one cannot be pro-Muslim and anti-War, at least not consistently. To be pro-Muslim is to be pro-War, or to put it in Muslim terms, pro-Jahad. Every decent rational human loving person is anti-Muslim if they know what Islam is. (I don't mean anti-Muslim individuals, I mean anti-Muslim ideology. If it is a religion, it is one on the same order as a Jim Jones Cult on a world-wide scale.)

Regi

Post 1

Wednesday, November 12, 2003 - 8:40am

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Why do I have the desire to cheer for this essay yet I find myself unable to without some hesitation?

Perhaps it�s a disagreement of style rather than substance. As I read your essay I hear a call for nuance and depth that I too find lacking from many Objectivist writers. There are certainly important parts of the scholastic and pre-Enlightenment culture that must be embraced, acknowledged and applauded. However, after you pile on counter-example upon counter-example, one gets the feeling that the pre-Enlightenment is superior in major if not most respects. Indeed, you end with a reassurance that basically says: �Hell, yes� viva the Enlightenment and don�t confuse me for an Enlightenment basher. Perhaps you also saw the need to counter some rhetorical excesses throughout the article and avoid false inference.

Your most important point is: �Objectivist insistence on black-and-white evaluations applies at the level of principles, not at the level of concrete individuals or historical eras.� Agreed. There is much to learn from pre- and post- Enlightenment periods while guarding against the failures of Enlightenment thinkers. And I agree that there is a knee-jerk reaction against these valuable contributions. After all, it is fidelity to principles, not a period or tradition, that must come first.

Thanks,
Rick

Post 2

Sunday, November 16, 2003 - 4:50am

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This is a superb article. A lot of food for thought here. I'm especially interested in what the author says about postmodernism. That Rand's thought understood the underlying forms of psychological or cultural oppression that can be used against individuals, is too often forgotten by many objectivists/libertarians who seem to treat political change as the be-all and end-all. The cultural basis of oppression (especially evident in areas like sexuality and gender) sometimes seems better understood by the postmodernists than by many objectivists, as Long suggests. Heresy? Perhaps. Certainly a much-needed challenge not to throw the baby out with the bathwater. Very refreshing to read this article.

Post 3

Sunday, December 7, 2003 - 3:52pm

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Thanks to everyone for their comments.

On Reginald Firehammer's comments:

I suppose I am "anti-Muslim" in the weak sense that I believe most of its tenets are mistaken. But I certainly do not agree that "To be pro-Muslim is to be pro-War." The term "Jihad" (not "Jahad") means any kind of sacred struggle or effort, not necessarily a military one. In the history of Islam one can find pro-war and anti-war strands, just as one can find strands that are pro-reason or anti-reason, pro-liberty or anti-liberty. And of course medieval Islamic civilisation made modern Western civilisation possible.

On Augustine -- the early Christian Church was divided between a Taliban-like faction that wanted to throw out all of pagan Greek and Roman learning and culture, and a more moderate faction that valued pagan learning and sought to synthesise it with Christianity. Augustine played a crucial role in securing the victory of the second faction, thus helping to ensure the survival of much classical philosophy, science, and literature that would have been lost otherwise. Western civilisation owes him an incalculable debt.

As for Aquinas, I agree wholeheartedly with Ayn Rand's description of him as an "illustrious example" of "those human bridges who are able to grasp and transmit, across years or centuries, the achievements men had reached � and to carry them further." What Augustine did for pagan culture generally, Aquinas did for Aristoteleanism in particular.

The claim that history would be better off without the contributions of all philosophers throughout history except the nine that Mr. Firehammer mentions is quite possibly the most bizarrely indefensible claim I have ever seen anybody make about the history of philosophy -- despite formidable competition for that status. (And it's worth noting that most of the thinkers on his list would themselves disagree with his assertion. Try telling Aristotle to leave Plato off. Try telling Rand to leave Aquinas off.)

On Rick Zuma's comments:

Yes, I piled on the counterexamples because I thought there was no need, with an Objectivist audience, to point out the virtues of the Enlightenment, since this audience already knows them. If I'd been addressing a crowd of Enlightenment-bashers my emphasis would have been different.

On Cameron Pritchard's comments: thanks!

Roderick

Post 4

Sunday, December 7, 2003 - 7:34pm

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I was glad to see that Roderick reposted this excellent article in SOLO, and I look forward to reading the further discussion of his article. For now, I want to take a moment to enlarge on the point that Roderick makes briefly in his response to Reginald Firehammer's comments on Islam. Roderick writes: "In the history of Islam one can find pro-war and anti-war strands, just as one can find strands that are pro-reason or anti-reason, pro-liberty or anti-liberty. And of course medieval Islamic civilisation made modern Western civilisation possible."

Roderick's essay makes many admirable points about the need for nuance and careful evaluation that spreads across *time*; I think a similar point needs to be advanced for nuance and careful evaluation that spreads across *space.* There's certainly nothing wrong for standing up for the genuine virtues of Euro-American civilization, and there's a lot to boo in the uncritical condemnation that it often receives at the hands of some parts of the Left. But there's certainly also good reason to be concerned when we see Objectivists issuing what seem to be mirror images of uncritical Leftist bromides about "the West." One of the most prominent and topical examples has been the wave of increasingly strident blanket condemnations of the past millennium-and-a-half of Muslim history, including flirtations with or outright endorsements of the Huntington "clash of civilizations" thesis - a methodological thesis that has far more to do with fascist Volksgeschichte than it does with liberal and enlightened scholarship.

In reality, of course, there is a great deal to praise in the history of Muslim civilization. Ibn Sina (Avicenna) stands as one of history's most remarkably wide-ranging intellects. Ibn Rushd (Averroes) helped to expand on ibn Sina's Aristotelianism; ibn Rushd was rightly seen, in both the Muslim and the Christian world, as one of history's foremost commentators on Aristotle. It was his work in the 12th century, transmitted into Western Europe by the Muslim Renaissance in Spain, which made the Christian Aristotelian Renaissance of the 13th and 14th centuries possible. (It is, of course, nothing more than a curious artifact of 18th-19th century ideology that Aristotle and Greek civilization broadly are treated as the exclusive property of an unbroken "Western tradition" that stretches from Athens to Oxford and New York. Greek thought was no less central to the intellectual history of the Muslim world than it was to that of the Western European world; Athens is further from Paris than it is from Baghdad.)

Moving from individuals to institutions, the great library of Baghdad stood for 400 years as the greatest beacon of learning in the civilized world, while Western Europe remained, by and large, a dark and troubled backwater. (In the 13th century Baghdad fell to the assaults of the Mongol horde. The invading Mongols sacked the library, tearing off the covers of books to resole their shoes and throwing uncounted historical treasures into the Tigris, until--it is said--the river flowed black with the ink from the ruined books. It was a catastrophe for civilization on a par with the destruction of the great library of Alexandria.) And lest anyone think that the main contribution of the Muslim world is to be measured in terms of their mummification of the past knowledge of the Greeks, it's also worth noting that it was medieval Islam's culture of global trade which brought Indian mathematics to Western Europe and made Baghdad a center for innovation in literature, medicine, and engineering; it was medieval Islam's culture of learning which created the academies of Cordoba and Toledo, to which we owe an incalculable debt for the emergence of that most quinessentially enlightened of all Western European institutions--the University.

Of course, this is hardly meant here as a collective hagiography for Muslim civilization. The Caliphate was no Atlantis; Muslim history is shot through with deadly theocracies, barbarous potentates, hide-bound tradition-worship, derogation of humanity and worldly existence, and oppression of the innocent. But so, of course, is *European* history, and not just during the middle ages, either. An objective understanding of history requires critical honesty on all sides; and if it's worth pointing out the virtues of Aquinas (or, of all people, Christopher Columbus), then it is *certainly* worth pointing out the virtues of Averroes too.

I've talked at length about these topics because I hope I can make explicit an aim that I see in both Roderick's points and mine. The point here is not just to remind you of some historical facts that you ought to know (although I also hope to do that.) What I hope to do, and I think what Roderick hopes to do too, is to get you to *feel* something that many Objectivists, it seems, have not heretofore felt--a passionate *bond* between ourselves and the high points of other ages and other nations, a recognition of human greatness wherever it is. That means that the heights of, for example, medieval Christendom and medieval Islam ought to be as passionately present to us as the heights of the European Enlightenment. We ought not to think of the heights of Muslim learning as so many "achievements" to be ticked off on some multicultural score-card--but rather to claim it as the common property of all civilized humanity. No matter how much we might disagree with Averroes in the end, he certainly has far more to do with us than he has with the Taliban. (Just as we have far more to do with Thomas Aquinas than he does with Jerry Falwell.)

Objectivism is, after all, a philosophy of the *individual* as a hero; where that insight is *followed through* it makes Objectivism a far more genuinely "multicultural" philosophy than the crude Volkishness of certain allegedly "Left-wing" relativists. Human greatness is always the greatness of *individuals*, and we ought to celebrate that greatness no matter the nation or age from which it arises. This is the grain of truth in the Revolutionary triad of "liberty, equality, and *fraternity:*" civilization is, as it were, an internationalist rather than a nationalist movement; we flourish most when our creation of values draws upon, cooperates with, and enlarges, the achievements of the whole world, without barriers in geography or in history.

Post 5

Monday, December 8, 2003 - 6:39am

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Charles, you must realize that Averroes was rejected by the Islamic world. He was banished and his books were burned. When Averroes made it clear what Aristotle meant � Islam panicked. Was this inherent in Islam or was this an unfortunate accident? By the way, Avicenna was also persecuted and Maimonides had to move from Corboba to avoid the threat of death.

Let�s not fall into the error of conflating the analysis of an idea with the analysis of a demographic group. Islam isn�t just anything done by anyone who adopts the nominal label of Muslim. We can�t understand Islam by saying whatever action done by someone who calls themselves Muslim must be an indication of Islam. We have to do an attribution analysis. Is it because of the religion or despite it?

Thus, the important question is: were the achievements of 10th-12th century Arab/Islamic individuals because of their religion or despite their religion? Did Muslims mistakenly allow a degree of Classically-inspired culture (both Hellenic and Indian)? Was it accidental or does Islam have a capacity for a sustained respect for rational secular scientific culture?

If we think in terms of essentials, how can we not be critical of Islam? It is a religion! It is essentially a rejection of reason and the embrace of faith and dogma. If it didn�t extinguish reason completely, that does not follow from the essence of Islam�s nature. However, that being said, let me join you in the celebration of those individuals who in part or to a great degree have struggled against the dominant culture to create achievements that stand among the greatest of all times. This does not celebrate the multi-cultural (except in the trivial demographic sense) � this celebrates the Hellenic � and reason wherever it is found.

Post 6

Tuesday, December 9, 2003 - 10:24am

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"were the achievements of 10th-12th century Arab/Islamic individuals because of their religion or despite their religion?"

Well, some of each, I think -- since, like most religions, even its core elements include good and bad aspects. As an example of a good aspect: as Muhammad was a trader, there was a pro-commerce strand in Islam from the beginning, while the pro-commerce strand in Christianity took longer to develop. Hence Islam's initially surpassing the Christian West in economic development was arguably to that extent because of, not despite, the religion. On the other hand, Islam's eventually falling behind the West as a result of its eventual rejection of Greek philosophy (after an initial period of acceptance) was arguably because of, not despite, the religion also. So the Islamic world owed its successes to the good aspects of its religion, and its failures to the bad aspects of its religion -- which is more or less what one would expect.

Post 7

Wednesday, December 10, 2003 - 4:58am

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Indeed, that is the kind of analysis desired. I think it is difficult, however, since a religion has no requirement for logical consistency. It is true the Muhammad was a trader before he invented Islam. However, when Islam was in power in Medina, plunder and force were the rule. It is also interesting to note that trade, not material production, was characteristic of Muhammed's locale. Finally, Islam created the race-based slave trade and relied on the subjugation of non-Muslims either by slavery or an oppressive taxation that was higher for non-Muslims. Still, the trade element was real and played a part. I�m tempted to say it was a legacy of pre-Islam but it would be unfair to deny that it was nevertheless part of Islam�s identity and played an important role.

Post 8

Wednesday, December 10, 2003 - 6:41am

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Roderick--

Bravo on your article! It's about time someone pointed this out. Thanks!

Post 9

Sunday, March 15 - 2:12pm

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Repeated searches for discussions of postmodern philosophy returned this as the best effort. Therefore, I post now to bring this to the fore.

I am currently reading Fashionable Nonsense by Alan Sokal and Jean Brickman (Amazon). Sokal is famous for his 1996 hoax that took in the editors of Social Text, a highly respected frontline sociology journal. In that work, Sokal wrapped strong subjectivism around authentic citations from postmodern philosophers.

That work (available here) began this way:

There are many natural scientists, and especially physicists, who continue to reject the notion that the disciplines concerned with social and cultural criticism can have anything to contribute, except perhaps peripherally, to their research. Still less are they receptive to the idea that the very foundations of their worldview must be revised or rebuilt in the light of such criticism. Rather, they cling to the dogma imposed by the long post-Enlightenment hegemony over the Western intellectual outlook, which can be summarized briefly as follows: that there exists an external world, whose properties are independent of any individual human being and indeed of humanity as a whole; that these properties are encoded in ``eternal'' physical laws; and that human beings can obtain reliable, albeit imperfect and tentative, knowledge of these laws by hewing to the ``objective'' procedures and epistemological strictures prescribed by the (so-called) scientific method.
But deep conceptual shifts within twentieth-century science have undermined this Cartesian-Newtonian metaphysics1; revisionist studies in the history and philosophy of science have cast further doubt on its credibility2; and, most recently, feminist and poststructuralist critiques have demystified the substantive content of mainstream Western scientific practice, revealing the ideology of domination concealed behind the fa�ade of ``objectivity''.3
1...metaphysics Heisenberg (1958), Bohr (1963).
2...credibility Kuhn (1970), Feyerabend (1975), Latour (1987), Aronowitz (1988b), Bloor (1991).
3...``objectivity''. Merchant (1980), Keller (1985), Harding (1986,1991), Haraway (1989,1991), Best (1991).

Before the end of the essay, Sokal declared: ".... the

of Euclid and the G of Newton, formerly thought to be constant and universal, are now perceived in their ineluctable historicity; and the putative observer becomes fatally de-centered, disconnected from any epistemic link to a space-time point that can no longer be defined by geometry alone."

They were fished in, hook, line and sinker, all the more so because Sokal is a physicist -- and the editors of Social Text were not.

With the revelation of the hoax, a firestorm broke out and it is not yet extinguished. ( Postmodernism is still with us, of course.) Objectivists will especially appreciate the fact the Sokal is a leftist -- of the old school. He was dismayed at how the left abandoned reason in our time and embraced the narrative reality of postmodernism (if you can "embrace" a fog). Joining him was someone else Objectivists might recognize from her cameos on recent John Stossel's 20/20 about "Bailout/Bull" Barbara Ehrenreich. Unfortunately, the links to her work on this subject are all old and now broken. However, you can appreciate her isolation by this review:

Engendering Rationalities.
Ed. Nancy Tuana and Sandra Morgen. SUNY
series in Gender Theory. Tina Chanter, general editor. Albany: SUNY
Press, 2001. viii + 413 pp. $75.50 h.c., 0-7914-5085-6; $25.95 pbk.,
0-7914-5086-4.
The essay collection Engendering Rationalities, edited by Nancy Tuana and
Sandra Morgen, is based on a conference by the same name that was held at the
Center for the Study of Women in Society, University of Oregon, in the spring
of 1997. As a participant at this conference, I recall a watershed moment.
Journalist and social critic Barbara Ehrenreich was giving one of the main
addresses. Ehrenreich chided feminist scholars for not taking seriously enough
the limits of the natural world and for promoting the view that various truths
about the world were in fact �socially constructed,� as were the criteria for truth
itself. Ehrenreich�s presentation was not well received and many in the audience
denied the merits of her accusations. However, I recall noting that the title of the
conference �enGendering Rationalities� gave at least prima facie support to
Ehrenreich�s concern.

Indeed, over the past twenty years feminist philosophers have authored numerous
criticisms of standard epistemology, suggesting that a) traditional concepts
of rationality were socially constructed; b) the constructions were designed along
social axes, such as gender, in order to serve those in positions of power, typically
a number of men; and finally c) the constructions would be better off for
reflecting a wider representation of the social realm, in particular, more women.
Of course, for feminist epistemologists, defining �better off� requires normative
content no longer available in traditional appeals to truth, and so begin the complex
discussions central to feminist philosophical discourse. That feminist articulations
of �social construction� are varied and often more sophisticated than is
recognized by critics still leaves feminist scholars in a tight spot vis-�-vis concerns
about relativism. If truth is relative to the social realm in which it was produced,
where does that leave the truths espoused by feminists?
To the credit of feminist philosophers, many of whom were in Ehrenreich�s
audience, this very question has been the focus of sustained investigation, both
at the conference itself and in any number of academic venues before and after.
Perhaps her negative reception at the conference was a result of Ehrenreich�s
failure to acknowledge that feminist philosophers are indeed aware of, and struggle
with, the very concerns she was raising.
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/journal_of_speculative_philosophy/v017/17.4clough.pdf

"If truth is relative to the social realm in which it was produced, where does that leave the truths espoused by feminists?"

This comes up in my class in criminological theory. Our textbooks are postmodernist anthologies that started off by demolishing positivism in two whacks: first there is no physical reality and second you cannot reason. (The statements were longer and more involved, of course.) Yet, if all we experience is a "smartly-crafted mass mediated hyper-reality" (jargon of the authors), then why is it wrong to hit a woman, or anyone for that matter? Why not just establish social norms that permit the previously impermissible and be done with all this talk about justice? Indeed, that is their goal -- to dismantle and disempower justice in order to privilege a new empowerment of the previously marginalized. Make no mistake, postmodernism is not just a bad aesthetic. They are after your wallet -- or more to the point, they want you to give up your wallet to spare the victim of your capitalist society the pain of having to steal it.

(Edited by Michael E. Marotta on 3/15, 2:23pm)

Post 10

Monday, March 16 - 6:58am

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That was a good read.

Is it just happenstance that the age of enlightenment was immediately preceded by the age of discovery/exploration, which ended the dark ages? I've never thought so.

The dark ages was a period of relative geopolitical stasis. Mankind's 2D surface growth paradigm took a brief pause at the edge of hostile gulfs seen as too great an impediment. An age of stasis and brute stagnation followed, unbroken until mankind once again re-invigorated the gradient of the 2D surface growth paradigm. It was that re-invigoration of gradient which gave birth not only to the Age of Enlightenment, but to what we call 'modernity.' Mankind lifted its focus off of the ground and well over the horizon. In doing so, opportunities for fresh new creative effort were envisioned and created all along the new gradient.

One of the successes of modernity, however, has also been a stress riser -- the rapid consumption of the gradient of the 'New' World. America put its last star on the flag almost 2.5 generations ago. Our technological range now dominates the surface of the planet, for all intents and purposes, for most of modernity, we have pushed the concept of frontier(and the resulting gradients)off the literal surface of the planet, into increasingly purely intellectual domains.

What was for a few hundred years a broadly experienced reinvigoration of gradient(providing opportunities for both steel plant builders and steel plant workers) has in modern times rapidly shifted to broad opportunities in narrow fields, increasingly specialized intellectual frontiers, and that is a broad, not narrow, problem.

When was the last time mankind entered into and experienced a prolonged period of geopolitical stasis? That was the fall of the Roman Empire.

There is one candidate path to the next Age of Enlightnenment, to the new Modernity, if we can get to that point, and that is, a transition from a now limited and depleted 2D surface growth paradigm to a 3D volume based growth paradigm. Geopolitical gradient drives opportunities all along the gradient, not just at the frontier. That is what makes frontier so valuable a concept. Maybe China will decide to do it, competing with India, as opposed to endlessly funding our carnival huckster financial engineered nonsense.

Maybe we'll watch, and instead, cook up our financial engineering nonsense, for as long as they tolerate our national corruption and insanity by buying our T-Bills and CDOs (RIP) and so on, while we pretend to rule the sky in aircraft designed in the 70's, and fly the last of our now thirty year old shuttle missions and claim leadership in technology, and so on. If not, then mankind is once again pausing on the shores of in-hospitable gulfs, and turning inward, and gearing down for a new dark ages.

As utopic as that is, it is no less utopic then the alternative; a spontaneous alignment of mankind in pursuit of purely intellectual frontiers, in a world soon pushing ten billion people.

There is another alternative; a resurgence of the dark ages, a literal restoration of the Caliphate, and similar. It's clearly not out of the question.

What will be the form of the equivalent paradigm shifting 'Age of Discovery/Exploration' that will transition us away from the end of the current 2D surface limited growth paradigm?

regards,
Fred

Post 11

Monday, March 16 - 5:30pm

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I think there are limits on regression. America may be on the verge of an intellectual and economic fainting-spell, but the world at large has its eyes wide open to the value of education and the free market, and its appetite is whetted for prosperity and personal achievement. Those in the best position to advance science and technologies may lag in the near future, but I don't doubt it is merely a question of slowed advancements. And it doesn't really matter on which continent the sparks flare. I do think your worst case scenario can be ruled out.

Post 12

Tuesday, March 17 - 9:13am

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Mindy:

By worst case scenario, you mean the restoration of the Caliphate? Probably. I mean, we're talking about folks who at the pointy end of their stick, can't light a fuse in their own damn sneakers. OTOH, they are incredibly persistent, have long memories, and are low maintenance. Their fringe warriors are leading a billion or so people with very little to lose in this world, except hope. (The Muslim world is way more complex than that. I've done business in places from Qatar and Bahrain to Bangladesh over the years, and unfortunately for the balance of the Muslim world and maybe world, period, it is too little U.A.E. and too much Bangladesh, but that is moot.) And, as we speak, the dark ages is procreating its way to taking over Europe.

At our present level of national economic stress, it wouldn't take much to knock us to our knees. Hell, we're doing it to ourselves, without their help, by willy nilly self poisoning the rules of commerce. Their best bet at this point could be to just wait and watch us self destruct.

Nobody reads the future quite so clearly, especially me, so caveat emptor. But people are something else, they are easy to read. So, I've been wondering for decades, 'How is this going to actually work?' As a young man, just out of grad school, I listened to my management order me to fake customer test data, for no reason, decided I couldn't do that, and quit on the spot. I left without a plan, without a clue, without a client list. But, I knew I couldn't work for them. It was my first and last job as an employee, 26 years ago. I asked myself then, "How does a mob of fools like this stay in business?" And of course, they didn't. Not because I left, but because they were idiots. But, they were idiots that had gotten away with it for years, and who had wrestled a ton of money away from the unsuspecting, foisting crap for value. And what I've observed since, as an outside consultant, is that this isn't all that rare; the bigger the mob, the higher the incidence of incompetents hanging on by their fingernails, cutting corners, and committing outright crime and corruption. An odd corollary to Gresham's Law is at work in our nation, and probably elsewhere as well. Gresham's Law, after all, is really about value.

Modernity, to me, seems like we have been enjoying a few generations of totally unpowered flight, riding an arc from great heights. Flying, we freshly believe, is more or less effortless. Well, gliding might be, but how did we get up here?

If only it were just gliding. That was the 50's, we've evolved...

Carcass carving is also effortless. Parasitism is. Sprinting from the Ivy Leagues to Wall Street to stare at the scoreboard and bet on the game using OPM is. And, when all of that is rewarded thousands of times what beast building is, who in their right mind for long is going to want to continue to build beasts in America especially when there is so much carcass to carve? You can hear it in FedEx CEO 'FredEx's voice, when he ponders his own 'reasonable' 15% asset value leverage rules, compared with Wall Streets self imposed 3000%+ leverage rules. It has clearly written itself quite some set of rules; wake up and smell the mob.

Actually being in the game, and beast building is something else altogether. Not all, but way too many of our self acclaimed 'best and brightest' decided long ago that beast building was what suckers did.

Until now. Because the bones are beginning to show after decades of all that imbalanced carcass carving. Now, the nervous pols are making speeches about what 'America must do' to compete, and so on. Education, science, technology, working hard, but yet, as a last resort, as we cling to the irrationality of wishing for our Nerf World, provided by others... not taking 'risk.' And by 'risk' we have totally conflated the 'risk' that someone takes in Vegas when they bet on the scoreboard with borrowed money, and the 'risk' that a beast builder takes when he risks his own skin to build beast in an insane tribe intent on rigging the rules in favor of the carcass carvers, by creating some kind of perverted upside down 'free-for-some', where success is punished to reward and subsidize failure. What was once tolerated at the fringes by the millions has rapidly become billions and is on its way to trillions as we speak. It is undeniably spiraling out of control, reaching its inevitable conclusion. Well, some are saying, screw that. So indeed...how is this model going to work?

All of the graceless lifeboat war rat-fighting we are witnessing is, I think, not the cause of our global economic stress, it is a result of an impersonal boundary condition, the relatively sudden loss of dirt simple geopolitical 2D surface gradient. What we are seeing is exactly what we should expect to see, in an end-game.

It's not like one day 2D surface gradient is suddenly all consumed, and yet, at the rate it was consumed in the end, it might as well have been. In the end, our technological range (the ability to exert command, control, communication and conduct commerce at a distance) has overwhelmed the surface of the planet, significantly obliterating the concept of frontier. (I don't mean 'overwhelmed' as in 'dominated', I mean 'overwhelmed' as in 'far exceeded'.) Not totally, and not completely, but at a rate and extent that significantly changed the nature of what drives economies that has exceeded our collective tribal systemic ability to rationally adapt.

It's not that this change hasn't also created great opportunities -- it clearly has. But, it was the rapid shift of domain of those opportunities to increasingly intellectual frontiers which has caused the broad stress. The rate at which we are adapting to increasingly intellectual frontiers is causing a shift, a displacement, that our nation -- and a world pushing ten billion -- is not keeping up with. IMO, that displacement is the stress we are witnessing, and the sideshow-- the stress on governments and people and economies, the rat cake end game lifeboat wars we are witnessing, and even, the broad global cultural conflict between the remnants of the dark ages and modernity as modernity struggles to transition to a new modernity, are all effects of not adapting to this displacement.

It's not that the 'old' dirt simple 2D surface growth paradigm did not have intellectual frontiers; it clearly did. But it had more than that, it was broader than that. Said simply, there were opportunities for both steel plant builders and steel plant workers. The nature of frontier as gradient maker is, there are broad opportunities all along the gradient, all the way from 'new world' to 'old world', and not just at the frontier. The required displacement from that boundary condition to the present(where 2D surface growth paradigm concept of 'frontier' is all but consumed by our technological range)is not happened as quickly and as smoothly as it would need to without appearing to be a painful end game of some kind.

It is an end game of sorts, it is the end game of the 2D surface growth paradigm here on the surface of the earth, a boundary condition that -nascent modernity- has only ever experienced before briefly, at the beginning of the last dark ages, and one that now mature modernity is freshly experiencing anew.

And, our pols are focused on propping up a 17.5 million unit/yr auto industry in the face of a 12 million unit/yr demand.

Because this paradigm shift does not occur plainly and cleanly, it occurs in sometimes brutal fits and starts. It seems sometimes, literally, as I read somewhere once long ago, that we are "paradigm shifting without the clutch."

As in, the world during this and last century.

regards,
Fred

(Edited by Fred Bartlett on 3/17, 9:22am)

Post 13

Tuesday, March 17 - 9:46am

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wow, that almost made sense to me Fred. Not sure I buy the 2d/3d stuff, but I like the "carcass carving" vs. "beast building" ideas

Post 14

Tuesday, March 17 - 11:16am

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Kurt:

I have it on good authority, it's a Mongolian BBQ, you get to pick what you like.

Give me the benefit of the doubt for just one moment(just, hold on to your wallet).

Imagine the following thought experiment. Picture a geopolitical map of the world, drawn from the perspective of modern man. (Any other concept of 'map' might be way too restrictive.)

Drawn when? Drawn every ten years, for the last ten thousand thousand years.

You have 1000 maps in your hands. (Better sit down.) Animate them, by looking at them over time, played at a constant rate, and note the rate of change of the geopolitical entities on the maps.

Do me a favor, and look at a Mercator of the world, so you can try and see the whole thing. Or, imagine you can see the whole flat surface of the world, ie, the thin 2D surface layer where 99.999999% of mankind's history and economies and wars and so on were conducted for those ten thousand years.

Not to be disparaging, but it will look a little like mold growing on an orange peel. However, the rate of change of the mold will not be the same over those 10000 years of animation. There will be long periods of slow growth, then fits of relative stasis, then rapid periods of dynamic change, and towards the end, all Hell breaks loose, but the concept of 'frontier' from the point of view of modernity will exist for that entire 10000 year timeline until the very end of the time series, aka, 'now', at which point it will very rapidly disappear and all but be consumed in a final, rapid flourish(precisely when our technological range is growing the fastest.)

It's not just the rate at which the concept 'frontier' disappeared on our 2D surface growth paradigm, but the fact that it disappeared which is a brand new boundary condition that our economies have had to adapt to -rapidly-. Our current economies exist in a period of rapid gradient, requiring rapid adaptation unlike any other period in our existence. We are nun-uniformly aided in our technology in dealing with it, but that same technology has accelerated the need to deal with it(by increasing the rate at which the historical gradient was consumed, at it's end.) As well, the 'aiding' also created new intellectual frontiers, but that rapid domain shift is also part of the current grinding of gears; not just our nation, but a world pushing ten billion people, is not shifting paradigms fast enough to avoid the pain of displacement. Are we constructivistly moving the tribe en masse to a new paradigm(we better 'pick' right if we really think that is possible), or is the tribe being unequally driven by events to a new paradigm?

'We' would like to regard this as happenstance, inconsequential. Something easily and readily adapted to. Sure enough, by some, but the catch is, it is occurring in the context of a world pushing ten billion people.

Is it an important boundary condition, one that impacts our economies? Or, a harmless artifact of history, something 'new' but inconsequential?

I'm not seriously asserting that transition to a 3D growth paradigm is the only possible new paradigm, or even a likely new paradigm. But I am seriously asserting that the boundary conditions on what has existed for all of mankind's history has suddenly and recently changed, it(the concept of 'geopolitical frontier') is effectively all but consumed, and so the historical 2D surface growth paradigm, a natural gradient boundary condition that drove our economies 'forever' at various rates, even with fits and starts, will now be replaced by 'something else' brand new, even if that turns out in the end to be just stagnation and decay and stasis and end game, like actual mold on an actual orange peel.

Yes, 'we' are smarter than mold, only, judging from our political leaders, not very much smarter than mold, when it comes to constructivist grandiose solutions for the really not a bee colony.

Smart enough? Hang on to your orange peel, we're going to find out.

regards,
Fred