08-01-2019, 02:56 PM
The educational system will have to change to promote humanistic values as a defense of conventional liberalism. The 40-hour workweek necessary for producing the goods of a prosperous industrial society will have to yield to the reality that we do not need to stockpile more stuff. We never quite made it to the three-car garage and an airplane in every middle-class suburban household. It's a good thing that we never got there! It is arguable that the urban-homesteading Millennial has far less material in his dwelling than did his GI grandparents setting up new lives in suburban America. When one can stream books and music one need not own the books, tapes, or discs of recorded music. Sure, the refrigerator, stove, and pieces of furniture are the same size, and one needs just as many clothes. But the flat-screen TV has less material in it than a black-and-white TV of the early 1950s; the car is probably much smaller. Energy use is down due to greater efficiency, and the only thing that can increase energy use is hotter weather that compels people to get and use air conditioning in places like Minnesota, Michigan, upstate New York, and New England.
People are going to have more spare time, so they had better learn how to make the best of it. Intellectual leisure, anyone? The greater the level and quality of education that people have, the less vulnerable they are to extremist ideologies. Even for the technically-trained (maybe especially for them), the liberal arts can be a worthy supplement. Just so that people can deal with the complexity of political life people need to study some economics, psychology, philosophy, and world history. People who know art, literature, and music (cinema encompasses all three) are rich in ways that millionaires who know none of that are poor. The 40-hour workweek will have to go, even in office environments in which much of the work is bureaucratic charades that produce or improve nothing. The commodity fetish will be an object of ridicule.
Unless commute times bloat, people will have more time to dote upon children (their own or someone else's), do their own cooking, and do household improvements. Some will do creative activities; to be sure, much of it will be hobbyist junk, but some of it will be worth sharing.
As is usual in a 1T the political culture becomes more conformist -- but also more egalitarian. Americans will be less tolerant of economic disparities associated with ethnicity, region, and the urban-rural divide. Today the regional divide may be more severe than race in deciding who is poor with little chance and who has a chance. Would you rather be white in eastern Kentucky or black in suburban Baltimore-Washington? Would you rather be white in southern West Virginia or Hispanic in the San Francisco Bay Area? I expect the cost of living to drive people to move to places that may now best be described as dying giant cities (like Detroit, Cleveland, and St. Louis) as opportunities move there to take advantage of lower costs of doing business.
(This assumes that this 4T will not culminate in a murderous, destructive apocalypse of the type that ravaged much of Europe in the Second World War, this time giving American cities the sorts of man-made disaster known in Warsaw and Hiroshima. But even in that event, survivors will insist on making things better than they were before).
Demagogues will be seen as people to avoid, whether they offer reactionary, revolutionary-socialist, or millennarian-fundamentalist restructuring of everything. The political center that has recently gotten the political shaft will get a renewal, and politicians will seek it out and even come from it. The bimodal split between reactionaries and ultra-liberals in political representation is much of our current pathology. The consensus will emerge that capital and labor are partners, and that thrift is a better idea than is printing funny money for stimulating growth.
People are going to have more spare time, so they had better learn how to make the best of it. Intellectual leisure, anyone? The greater the level and quality of education that people have, the less vulnerable they are to extremist ideologies. Even for the technically-trained (maybe especially for them), the liberal arts can be a worthy supplement. Just so that people can deal with the complexity of political life people need to study some economics, psychology, philosophy, and world history. People who know art, literature, and music (cinema encompasses all three) are rich in ways that millionaires who know none of that are poor. The 40-hour workweek will have to go, even in office environments in which much of the work is bureaucratic charades that produce or improve nothing. The commodity fetish will be an object of ridicule.
Unless commute times bloat, people will have more time to dote upon children (their own or someone else's), do their own cooking, and do household improvements. Some will do creative activities; to be sure, much of it will be hobbyist junk, but some of it will be worth sharing.
As is usual in a 1T the political culture becomes more conformist -- but also more egalitarian. Americans will be less tolerant of economic disparities associated with ethnicity, region, and the urban-rural divide. Today the regional divide may be more severe than race in deciding who is poor with little chance and who has a chance. Would you rather be white in eastern Kentucky or black in suburban Baltimore-Washington? Would you rather be white in southern West Virginia or Hispanic in the San Francisco Bay Area? I expect the cost of living to drive people to move to places that may now best be described as dying giant cities (like Detroit, Cleveland, and St. Louis) as opportunities move there to take advantage of lower costs of doing business.
(This assumes that this 4T will not culminate in a murderous, destructive apocalypse of the type that ravaged much of Europe in the Second World War, this time giving American cities the sorts of man-made disaster known in Warsaw and Hiroshima. But even in that event, survivors will insist on making things better than they were before).
Demagogues will be seen as people to avoid, whether they offer reactionary, revolutionary-socialist, or millennarian-fundamentalist restructuring of everything. The political center that has recently gotten the political shaft will get a renewal, and politicians will seek it out and even come from it. The bimodal split between reactionaries and ultra-liberals in political representation is much of our current pathology. The consensus will emerge that capital and labor are partners, and that thrift is a better idea than is printing funny money for stimulating growth.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.