07-30-2020, 01:17 PM
(07-30-2020, 08:33 AM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote: I generally work with a system that puts turnings, ages, civilizations and behavioral psychology together. Of these, ages and civilizations are fairly common partitions in the academic study of history. This site is generally centered on S&H turning theory, so I usually don’t have problems with people taking this seriously. Behavioral psychology isn’t as popular as it once was, but generally if you talk about hunter gatherer behavior or the behavior of other hunter packs people follow along without too much of a quibble. If you just quote the biblical line about behold the land of milk and honey, slay the men, enslave the women and children, that is all you need to remind people of what mankind evolved to be.
Excellent point. Obviously, Howe and Strauss theory cannot explain everything, but it does explain much. Several cycles and long-term trends operate, too, as does Prabhat Sarkar's cyclical theory of a succession of social elites based upon economic roles parallel to castes in India (warrior-kings, then intellectuals, then merchants and industrialists (the Acquisitors), and then the proletariat. The United States does not have a caste system, strictly speaking, as sons and daughters of one of these groups can go into the other or adopt their style.
Sarkar's cycle suggests that the era of merchants, bankers, industrialists, and landlords is approaching an end due to the depravity within those elites. Toward the end of the run of the Acquisitors, the acquisitive elite has plenty of sources of easy money through exploitation instead of investment and innovation. They seem largely to be sitting on passive investments while they grind others into poverty, and they promote stupidity and destructive hedonism as a means of controlling others. At that stage, virtue is rare and vulgarity is the norm. Scams such as insider trading, 419 frauds, Ponzi schemes, and pump-and-dump become commonplace. Government under the thumb of Acquisitive elites becomes complicit. Unlike the earlier stage of the Aquisitor Age, people are interested in getting money ad indulging themselves more than they are with creating it for themselves, their progeny, and their community. Inequality of income reaches unprecedented levels, and few in power act responsibly. At the extreme we have the late Jeffrey Epstein, a financier who operated his "Lolita Express" with willing accomplices and clients.
The rot is self-evident. But are the proles to be trusted? Not if they lack the ability to sacrifice of the warrior-kings who reorganize society, the cleverness of the intellectuals, or the early acumen of the Acquisitors in the early and best stage. Some proles break the mold -- but to put it this way, one is no longer a prole if one leads an army, builds a palisade, writes epic poetry or contemplates physical law, or starts a successful business.
Quote:My major possibly new thought in combining these perspectives is if you cross a border in turnings, ages or civilizations, that which you thought you learned by examining reality is not to be trusted. This mostly manifests in that which you learned in the Industrial Age is not to be absolutely trusted in the Information Age until the pattern observed has been seen to reproduce in the Information Age.
It is never onward and upward without decay of the tendency to rise. Thermodynamics is a good model for economics, and it may surprise many that some of the greatest contributions to economics come from chemists who developed models that added equilibrium to economics and made the study a near-science. To say that economics is chemistry without the reagents is not much of an exaggeration. Le Chatelier's principle in chemistry is a good analogy for diminishing returns. Ways that used to induce productivity become less effective that they are used, and more stuff does not lead to the same extent as it did when the stuff was rare and special.
Quote:For example awakenings in the Industrial Age generally took the form of religious revivals. In the Information Age, the one example we have was much more to protest politically. I expect the next awakening to more closely resemble the 1960s than the older religious awakenings.
One of the effects of the Enlightenment is the weakening of religion as a source of knowledge. Fanaticism, as one atheist slogan says "Science built jetliners and skyscrapers, and (referring to 9/11) religion flew jetliners into skyscrapers". Religion as an anodyne for economic distress that an economic elite imposes becomes increasingly suspect the more that people know. Religion may have some value in teaching people right from wrong; the mass culture is not particularly reliable at that, economic motivations are inadequate, and a state system of brutal punishments for misconduct may be too destructive of freedom (People's Republic of China as an example). This said, I doubt that we can get much moral learning from any Gospel of Wealth preaching or speaking in tongues, let alone snake-handling.
This said, our MBA students could use some learning of ethical values that sustain a workable society so that life isn't all personal gain without responsibility to subordinates.
Quote:Now once in a while I wind up debating a Marxist or a fundamentalist who believes in the absolute Truth of everything in the writings of Marx or the Bible. These are remarkably similar mindsets. What I have found is that I am never as good with the other guy’s preferred Book as the other guy. I did my Saturday classes with the Catholic nuns, was a regular with the Christian Fellowship at Northeastern, took philosophy courses that covered Marx as well as a Russian history course. I'm no slouch, but not a match for someone who has made one of these Books the core of his world view. The debater keeps pulling everything back into his Book which he believes in with absolute certainty.
From what I have met, the Jews seem to do well without the need for Jesus unless they are complete rogues, and with someone like Jeffrey Epstein, Jesus would have done him no good. One can have a solid moral compass based on Islam, Buddhism, or the syncretic mixtures of non-Christian Chinese, Koreans, Thais, and Japanese. Whether Hinduism in India took on subtle effects of Christian moral teachings under British rule or did not makes little difference. This said, one can get a very ethical culture without the need of any God.
The only benefit of religion in enforcing morality, so far as I can see, is the fear of Hell for egregious sinners who at the time of Judgment get separated from the innocent who enjoy eternal bliss. If anything I would have the Puritan idea of the Righteous having prime seats for watching the torment of the Damned turned on its head: I would have Holocaust perpetrators condemned forever to see the delights that their victims enjoy in Heaven while the evil-doers are ripped apart by the vicious dogs of the concentration camps under the guidance of kapos.
Quote:On the other hand I see the Bible as a historical document which shows how one culture evolved and changed over many years. You can see how that conflicts with someone who believes that it is a unified book with no conflicts or corrections, but deletes in his mind the phrases which cause contradictions. As the book goes from an eye for an eye to turning the other cheek, you can see the problem. The Jews of the Bible are evolving and transforming their culture into the Christian view.
Some day I may have to ask how much of the Gospel is really a plagiarism of contemporary Jewish thought. Hillel, perhaps?
Quote:And Marxism? A pretty good understanding of the division of wealth problem for the time of its writing. A pretty bad solution to the problem. They have not and I believe can not put the solution into practice. Every time one starts to walk down that path, you wind up in the valley full of milk and honey, killing the men, and enslaving the women and children. It is damn hard not to wind up in that valley. We have spent ages in that valley before slowly learning to climb out.
Someone once accused me of being a Marxist for not believing in capitalism at its worst. I fault both, whether the killing fields of the Congo or the killing fields of Cambodia for the same reason: the body count. Human nature is far from perfect and likely never will be. That is why we have police, courts, jails, and even (at times) the gallows. Those are checks and balances upon the worst of human behavior.
This said, we must at times break the rules of tradition and old assumptions if we are to achieve something truly worthy. Some of those rule-breakers are the great innovators, reformers, and creative people who make the world richer for their discoveries and improvements.
Quote:In the recent 3T, it was the red and blue values that were debated. Always before the newer values came to overwhelm the old when the crisis heart arrives. With both the virus and the Black Lives protest favoring the blue values, history is seeming to repeat.
The "red" side attempted to achieve its logical conclusion of economic hierarchy and a monolithic culture, non-participants in that culture to be consigned to failure and suffering. That side disgraced itself by going along with a man who praised that monolithic culture yet has displayed no trace of a moral compass (you know who). The rest of us tried to find what we could share, and it was loyalty to such things as checks and balances, separation of power, and a commitment to the idea that a wholesome society works for all people of good will. That is what a Hasidic Jew in New York can have in common with a Mexican-American in Far South Texas who is a devout Catholic...
Quote:Marxism was last an almost pertinent value set in the 1930s, and is not a modern contender.
The body count. See also fascism. If anyone thinks that the American KKK and Alt-Right will be any better than commies and fascists of the early-middle part of the twentieth century, then I wish to give them the image of the gates of a worldly Hell that greet people with an Anglo-Saxon version of Nazi Newspeak "Arbeit Macht Frei"... and images of the prisoner docks at the Nuremberg and Tokyo trials at which people will be judged for the suffering that they created.
Quote:While Marx may have been good in predicting automation and computers, he did not predict the Information Age lack of crisis war triggers and thus revolutions. Just not there. Stop pretending it is.
Marx' call for revolution was most likely to succeed in the harsh era of early industrialization in places with pathological government capable of enforcing human sacrifices to Lord Mammon without offering much improvement, and then in times when the system broke down as the result of a military or civil calamity.
Marx did seem to suggest that a super-prosperous world would lead to a glorious new era in which human need and economic insecurity would vanish. Commodity fetishes would become obsolete. That transition, if such is what we are in, will not be as easy as it might have seemed even forty years ago.
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.
