05-21-2020, 10:59 PM
(05-21-2020, 07:46 PM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote:(05-17-2020, 09:26 PM)Kinser79 Wrote: You have admitted in the past to being a Whig historian. That isn't a fantasy.
I have three ways of looking at history, Ages, Turnings and Civilization. Ages assumes progress. They go from Hunter Gatherer to Agricultural to Industrial to Information. Turnings as originally presented focused on the American series of crisis, how with Turnings you move from the Agricultural Age to the Industrial Age. For three plus turnings the slavery compromises hold the culture fairly firm, then you hit the heart of the crisis and wham. Thus, they too show a form of progress. The Civilizations just allow various parts of the world to do this at a different pace.
The transformation from the Industrial Age (when people can create more happiness by supplying more stuff) to the Information Age has not been easy for people who were prepared for the industrial world. Industrial workers are trained to badly fit information-era norms. To do well they will need to be craftsmen and even artists. The industrial age depends upon experiences and knowledge, with the material basis relatively cheap.
In education alone we will need great changes in method. Rote repetition will become irrelevant except on a few things (like arithmetic tables). The ability to get and use information will matter far more than possessing information. We will need to develop healthy habits in deciding what information we want. People will still need moral judgment that allows them to see fascist material (whether Nazis, Klan, or ISIS) as disgusting. Propaganda works most effectively on people if they are of limited learning typically at or near the elementary level; beyond that dangerous level or learning people are more able to read between the lines.
But having an Information Age is not enough. People will accept it much more readily if they can not only use it, but prosper from it. It will be necessary that people be able to participate in it for personal gain just as easily in West Virginia as in the San Francisco Bay Area. The ability of elites to keep the boon from employment in the Information Age in a few places of extreme rents is one sure way to deny most people any ability to participate in it while those who participate in it pay premium rents to slumlords.
Quote:Some try to deny or stop the progress. Often times during the unraveling it seemed they had succeeded. Without the ability to look back at previous unraveling eras, previous times of hedonism, stagnation, politics, compromises, debate and acrimony, it would be hard to see how things were going to break loose.
Repeated or catastrophic failure has a way of breaking some very bad habits. OK -- hedonism is a suitable reward for doing the necessary but unpleasant work that makes the economic order tick. Debates done well lead to viable compromises in politics instead of continuing acrimony and stagnation. Lately, as one would expect in an over-extended Unraveling, politics becomes a struggle to protect oneself if the loser or a means of consolidating economic and bureaucratic power if one is the winner. A neat division between winners and losers creates long-term instability.
Quote:In many ways the bug is painful. But in certain ways I am glad the crisis heart is finally here. I get to sit back in my enforced isolation and watch the people who have fought change not know what hit them.
We are finding out and even rediscovering a few things the hard way. That is how Crisis eras work. Some basic realities that we try to evade keep tugging at us until we give in.
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.