03-12-2021, 11:15 AM
(03-08-2021, 02:44 PM)David Horn Wrote:(03-07-2021, 07:32 PM)Tim Randal Walker Wrote: Regarding David Horn's comments....
If I recall correctly, somebody once pointed out that the Missionary Awakening had an amount of labor activism that is unusual for a 2T. Which was, of course, the 2T that followed directly after the Gilded Age.
The double rhythm suggests that the next 2T may be of the same general type as the Missionary, an Apollo awakening. Of course, a 2T is one of the two turnings in which there may be significant reforms.
I've thought for a few years now that the necessary changes need much more time to gel, so yes, the next 2T may start the process. We've moved from the Agricultural Age to the Industrial and right on to the Information Age in the short period of two centuries. And if the pace of change is and has been far outside the typical for the last 2 saecula, this one seems to be even faster. Our governments aren't structured for this -- not here or anywhere else I can see. There is no economic model with capital assets but no labor component, and that's approaching fast.
We Boomers started with "Peace, Love, and Dope" and ended up with Donald Trump and "Rash Libel"... maybe the more sober and humane of us might have offered something different from either, but we are now old enough that others (for now X and Millennial adults) will need to cadge something together. We need concord before we can attain peace, and our love had better have something less transitory than lust behind it. "Dope" is of course an unmitigated disaster.
Technological change, if successful, forces cultural and economic change. The telephone and automobile changed greatly how people dated. Singles from Milwaukee and South Bend think little of the difficulty of meeting in Chicago... well, it isn't that difficult to drive, but such would have been exceedingly difficult in 1870. "Let's meet at the Art Institute in front of Seurat's Grande Jatte...
Technology notwithstanding, many of us have old but irrelevant patterns remaining from the Agricultural era, including the desire of elites to literally lord it over a helpless peasantry. Such is narcissism. Boomers at their worst rediscovered that vice and made it their self-description.
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.