ACA Repeal/Replace: Progressives Face Moral Dilemma

[Bob Butler 54]

(03-20-2017, 05:24 PM)Kinser79 Wrote: The tags are getting messy again.

Yep.  Most exchanges we're more or less in the same ballpark.  I'll focus on one, and try to revert to essay format.

(03-20-2017, 05:24 PM)Kinser79 Wrote:

I Wrote:Which gives a Whig like me an arrow of progress.  Push for equality.  Try to cut back on the power and wealth of the elite ruling class.  Try to oppose those attempting to maintaining the influence and privilege of a given race, gender, religion, or culture.  Human rights and democracy are useful tools, best aimed at elite ruling classes.

In general I would agree but I do not subscribe to the Whig Historian notion of an arrow of progress.  Rather I see a more spiral like cycle at play.  Nations and Empires are born, have their productive time periods, grow old and then die.  There may or may not be progress materially or within the realms of rights but often there is not.

I have three perspectives which I juggle together.  The longest term is Waves of Civilization, vaguely line with Toffler's 'The Third Wave', but in my opinion Toffler got a lot of stuff wrong.  I have no interest in defending most of his stuff, but he did draw some lines dividing some quite distinct patterns of human cultures.  The four waves might be hunter-gatherer, agricultural empire, industrial age and a hypothetical information age which might or might not be starting.

The second pattern is civilizations, touched on by Toynbee's A Study of History, Huntington's Clash of Civilizations and others.  Civilizations might include Western, Islamic, Orthodox, Chinese and others.  Civilizations have core states.  As you say, the rise in influence and fade in time.  Again, I'm not interested in defending the specifics of Toynbee and especially Huntington, but they drew some relevant borders.

The third is the S&H cycle.  This works reasonably well for the transition of western civilization from the agricultural age to the industrial age.  It works far less well for any other wave and any other civilization.  I like the four moods of a culture might be in, high, awakening, unravelling and crisis.  I am not a believer that the cycle is universal, regular and clock work.  I can't treat S&H cycles as equivalent of Newton's classic clockwork physics.  Modern physics, with chaos theory and quantum effects, is a lot messier than Newton, as is my view of history.  

My Whig arrow of progress does reasonably well for western civilization during the transition from the Agricultural Age pattern to the Information Age.  Try to use it in earlier times and places that aren't shifting towards the industrial pattern and it won't be overly relevant.  I'm generally dubious that lessons learned by studying one wave of civilization will apply cleanly in another wave.  Toynbee looked at a lot of centuries and a lot of civilizations and made some solid generalizations that apply nicely to Agricultural Age cultures.  To me, they smell awfully fishy if one tries to apply them to Industrial Age or hunter gatherer cultures.

My big problem is the hypothetical Information Age.  The Industrial Age centered on printed information, fossil fuel energy, and chemical weapons.  The hypothetical Information Age might be based on computer networked information, renewable energy, and weapons of mass destruction (and/or proxy guerrilla tactics).  These changes seem to me significant enough to consider that the hypothetical Information Age is real, that everything we think we know, all the lessons we have learned from earlier patterns of civilization, must be questioned.  While a lot of people are looking in the past for patterns that might be repeating, I am looking for old patterns that made sense during the Industrial Age that are falling apart.

Where would the transition point be?  Start with the two nukes at the end of World War II.  Look at the computers and networks that started in the 1950s and have since gone hog wild.  Any pattern that might be fond based on history before that point might be taken with a grain of salt.  One must look for new patterns as well as trying to apply old ones.

Hypothesis.  The four stroke S&H cycle?  Caput.  Gone.  The 1960s awakening was as much like a crisis as an awakening.  The four stroke spiral drove whiggish progress nicely until then, with major big deal crisis wars resulting in major transformations in the culture.  Given nukes, will we see major big deal crisis wars on a regular basis anymore?  We might disagree on what to call the recent pattern of alternating power in the US.  False Regeneracy?  Micro-turning?  Whatever we call it, we might not get the much desired and expected regeneracy and crisis transformation.  The physical analogy might no longer be an ascending spiral.  It might be a pendulum swinging between red and blue.

I am not confident that old patterns are going to hold.

I can appreciate that you are looking at history and looking for patterns that are echoing the present.  That's fair game.  That's what we do here.  Carry on.

I'm nervous that a lot of patterns that were solid enough in the past might no longer apply in a transformed technological environment.

And for that reason, I'm not following in great depth theories like mega saeculum.  I've got enough going on trying to combine waves, civilizations and S&H cycles meaningfully.  My focus isn't currently on looking too deeply into the past.