Revenge of the Forgotten Class

[pbrower2a]

(08-14-2017, 08:29 PM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote: [quote pid='27724' dateline='1502738525']
The left-right axis is alive and well, and stronger than ever, and although Millennials and Xers may complain about it, I don't see them offering any viable alternatives. As long as powerful, wealthy people hog all the benefits of automation and globalization, to the detriment of the people and their environment, the left-right axis continues beyond the industrial age. As long as they are able to rig the political system, and arouse the prejudices of their non-wealthy but regressive followers to their favor, then those who oppose them and stand for greater equality and ecology are "the left" and must be supported. That's what's happening, and those who don't see it are truly blind.

If we accept the idea of ages of civilization, the three recent are agricultural, industrial and possibly information.  The agricultural would feature the written word, animal power and muscle powered weapons.  The industrial would feature the printed word, steam power, and gunpowder weapons.  The hypothetical information age would feature computer networks, renewable energy and nukes.  While the information or post scarcity would is hypothetical in many ways, the technology changes are a big deal.  The development of new patterns is quite plausible.
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The agrarian culture did not go down without a fight. It proved adaptable to technology as technology was good for getting more production (which stimulated economic growth that expanded its market), pampering the big landowners (if not the peasants), and of course getting the military weaponry and police tools for enforcing the power of the rural aristocracy. It is arguable that fascism offered what remained of the rural aristocracy the last-ditch defense against social modernity. Big landowners found in fascism the best defense against losing near-serfs to non-traditional (meaning industrial) work and against land reforms that would have broken the gigantic estates to farmers. It is telling that Fascist Italy, Nazi Germany (notice the promotion of Lebensraum and Blut und Boden), Thug Japan, and Vichy France had back-to-the-land themes.

I don't expect the industrial culture to go down without a fight, either. Nobody likes decline or even relative decline. Industrial culture may have created its own demise in its own success, much as the most 'successful' routes in getting Americans across the country in the early era of the automobile (like US 10, US 11, US 31, US 40, US 41, US 66, US 80, US 91, and US 99) were the ones most likely to be supplanted with expressways. But an information-age business like Wal*Mart (and Wal*Mart was an innovator in information technology in the banal activity of low-end marketing) can push such competitors as Montgomery-Ward, Mervyn's, Radio Shack, On-Cue, and quite possibly Sears and J C Penney that did not make so strong a commitment to information technology) into oblivion. But information technology means that more people can be involved in managing material objects without ever touching them or even seeing them.

Quote:Eric suggested things have been popping for about 500 years.  By coincidence or design, this suggests Martin Luther’s Ninety Five Theses of 1517 as an off the cuff marker for the agriculture / industrial cusp.  While it may be a bit early, I’d throw the Hiroshima bomb out as an early marker for the industrial / information cusp.

Jan Hus was even more radical, and his Moravian Brethren are the first modern Protestants. Hus and Luther both left the Roman Catholic Church to create communities of believers free  from the institutional corruption of the medieval (or still medieval in many of its ways) Roman Catholic Church. The difference between Hus and Luther were (aside from personal fates) was that Hus lacked the printing press as an ally and Luther did. Luther was able to get parts of the Establishment on his side, and Hus couldn't. Hus was burned at the stake; Luther lived to a ripe old age by standards of the time. Calvin, Knox, and (Menno) Simons -- likewise.  

Nuclear weapons? I am tempted to believe that these are very industrial in creation. The heavy use of academia (physicists, mathematicians, chemists, and engineers) for a single project reminds me in some ways of the expensive building of medieval castles and cathedrals of the agricultural age  -- big projects. Maybe motion pictures, sound recordings, radio, and television mark the real beginning of the Information Era.

Depending upon a consumer market is more reliable than is relying upon the government for funding. It is arguable that the satellite television (most material that you see on cable TV comes from a satellite), video recording, personal computers and the Internet, and various levels of playback gear have done much to create the Information Age and gut the economic power of big players of the Industrial Era -- even causing bankruptcies. Attempts to meld information technology with old institutions do not always get good results for the old institutions, especially when those institutions have their own institutional rot. Even the federal government (which still used mainframe computers long after those were obsolete in much of private industry) could get a severe  shake-up.  

Quote:If those are more or less acceptable, the major transformations between cusps might include the Reformation, the Industrial Revolution, the Enlightenment, shifting political power from the hereditary nobility to democracy, ending slavery in North America with the parallel enabling of the robber barons, the New Deal and the world wars.  I’m open to any suggestion of other significant transitions.  I’m likely several short.

Feminism, decolonization, the struggles for civil rights first of ethnic pariahs and then homosexuals, and environmentalism...
 
but don't forget such sordid failures as Marxism-Leninism, fascism (including the Klan), Apartheid, Ba'athism, and ISIS. Note well that I consider President Trump as much a symptom as the disease itself: populism devoid of principle or even a commitment to service. 

Quote:Looking at these transitions, it is not hard to pick out an arrow of progress.  I’d suggest the culture shifts to follow technology, thus elites gaining power through the new technology have an edge.  Academic, religious and political theories enable the new elites and common man.  Democracy and human rights have done well.  Church, politics and even academics have become less controlled by an autocratic hierarchy, more by a competition of ideas.

But no matter how the technology changes, certain old standards of decency remain. Even something so seemingly-daring as same-sex marriage comes at the same time as a harsh repression of child sexual abuse and domestic violence (I have no problem with either same-sex marriage or the harsh repression of child sexual abuse and domestic violence, by the way. Mainstream gays and lesbians who wanted marriage had to offer some concessions to conservative, pro-family values; recognition of homosexual rights is essential for law and order, as I can attest. I have been gay-bashed).

I take a good look at the Ten Commandments (Exodus 20) and recognize that murder, theft, adultery, fraudulent oaths, perjury, reckless disdain for parental authority, and unproductive envy create  nothing but trouble. Even honoring the Sabbath implies a day of rest; working people to exhaustion is murderous, as shown in the consequences of the most amoral order that ever existed (Nazi Germany).  OK, the prohibition of graven images does define Jews from the pagans of the time.  Want a different code of ethics not associated with the West? Try the Eightfold Path of the Buddha.

No matter how technology has changed, human nature has changed little since antiquity. We can read ancient Greek and Sanskrit literature in translation and get much from it. We can still learn from the Hebrew prophets. The new vices are simply old ones with new raiment.

Quote:Thus, while I’m trying to respect tradition and the merit and place of older power structures and ideas, at heart I see much of the transitions we’ve faced as adaptation to new technology and setting the culture to best adopt to a changing reality.  Elites who benefit from existing power structures will resist, but the world moves on and to some extent cultures must follow.

Short-circuiting the old decencies to get more rapid progress or quick profit compromises the progress and soils the profit; such short-circuiting has usually led to discord. Maybe we need look deeper into the past than is now fashionable so that we can fit some universal law of human goodness. It is the old elites that may be most likely to short-circuit the old decencies that they consider necessary for the proles and peons to obey so that the proles and peons can acquiesce in their exploitation and degradation while the old elites (really, usually the descendants of the old elites so that the elites aren't so new even if the old power structures are literally old).

One of the ironic effects of modern technology is that we can reach further into the past.  If you listen to medieval polyphony for its soothing effect you are doing something very modern -- because this music is a modern rediscovery as much as a medieval creation. An attempt to recreate it on the gramophone or its successor is distinctly modern. It is far easier to learn ancient languages (Latin excluded) today because so much material is accessible on line.

I am convinced that the liberal arts remain essential to the richest life possible even for technically-trained people. Maybe we will turn undergraduate education back to its old objective of the structured school of liberal arts that create a solid foundation for further learning or for preparation for membership in better-respected elites (and doing anything creative makes one part of the elite). We are going to need to know how to live with more leisure and with more technological wonders at our disposal.

Quote:The world hasn’t stopped changing.  Thus, there will still be elites clinging to power while the culture, struggles with the changes.  I don’t see how the technology shifts of the hypothetical information age changes that.  The issues change.  The change changes.  So it has always been over the 500 year interval.  Global warming, renewable energy, health care and jobs availability seem lurking changes that in time will demand action.  

But greed, sadism, and destructive lust remain. Just think of the world of The Wolf of Wall Street. Good people do not need stripper parties in the office. They have no use for cocaine. They don't need the biggest, showiest yacht. They don't need to dump one wife for another wife who begins the relationship looking like the Playmate of the Month. Poverty may be no virtue (if anything, we need to abolish it), and it usually results in the modern world from excesses of elites. 

Quote:Must the adaptation come now?  That isn’t clear.  A great number of folks can ignore problems for another election cycle, or two, or many.  The crisis might not seem as blatantly obvious and immediate as past transitions have seemed.  There is no government endorsed slavery, or the crushing Gilded Age poverty and repeated economic crashes that let to the New Deal.  Without that tension and pressure, conservatives holding the status quo have an edge.

But we have multitudes who voted for Donald Trump.  It may just be bad  luck that he got elected with less than a plurality of the vote. I consider him potentially the most destructive President in American history, not only for the destructive arsenal at his disposal (which we can say of every President since Truman) , but also for his personal  vileness and complete lack of scruples. Add to this he has plenty of enablers in a Congress effectively run by corporate lobbyists. The United States of America is a Republic in Name Only, practically a dominant-Party system and with a President whose inner circle operates like a royal court in an absolute monarchy.We have a President rejecting objective science because the interests around him want such science denied.

Yes, Donald Trump is political misfortune. But think of what made him possible. Economic inequality has intensified to the point that food insecurity is a reality. Workplace management is as harsh as ever. Labor unions are dying. The educational system is good at either training people to be amoral technicians or, should the graduates not be able to get work, consumers of the bilge that is mass low culture.

Had Donald Trump not existed this time, then someone else would have taken the role. But if Trump fails, the mass resentments and mass superstition and ignorance make possible the rise of a left-wing demagogue. Let us remember that although we are excellent at creating wealth we are cutterly inept at sharing what that wealth can provide. Executives making 100 times as much as a production-line worker or sales clerk see only one thing wrong with things as they are-- that they have to pay taxes!
 

Quote:One difference today is the lack of a new elite pushing new technology that requires structural basic changes to become wealthy and acquire power.  Capitalism is working fine from that perspective.  Thus the frequent alliance between working folks seeking equality and a new elite pursing the levers of power seems to be missing.  Without such an alliance, the regular clockwork crises that have ticked on in the Anglo American sequence seems to be faltering.

As one set of capitalists takes hold, others decline.  Anderson Cooper, son of Gloria Vanderbilt and alleged scion of the Vanderbilt fortune has admitted that the once-great Vanderbilt fortune is no more. He really does need those stints as a journalist.

Donald Trump really has forged an alliance between a powerful elite and white working people who resent the alleged elite of the middle class that looks down upon poor white people. That elite would rather bring up non-whites who share some values and have competence than bring up white people. So who are the elites that poor white people hate? The ones that they see -- the tax-collector. The divorce attorney. The teacher who corrected their grammar rudely  (and the one that does much the same to their kids). The scientist.

So Donald Trump needles the 'elite' which turns out to be only middle class in his political rhetoric. If he charges exorbitant rent that guts the pay of people who live in New York City, well he doesn't collect rent from their hovels or house trailers. 

Quote:Another aspect is the incredible energy of the GIs, their willingness to attack and solve problems, ended by the national malaise and unravelling memes.  This results in a divided culture where many are unwilling to address problems.  I don’t see this as directly tied to the changing technology of the hypothetical information age, but the timing of it makes it part of the puzzle.

But the GI Generation largely endured hardscrabble childhoods by current standards. A Polish-American or Italian-American GI child almost certainly knew poverty that makes the more normal urban poverty of our time look like an improvement. Of course their grandchildren may be doing very well, thank you. The Great Depression forced America to reinvent its institutions to meet a grave danger of economic collapse, and World War II forced America to become the Arsenal of Democracy if the world was not to become a nightmare of torture chambers, slave labor camps, and massacres.

The GI Generation had plenty of problems to attack and solve. But once they solved those problems America became complacent. Anything became possible -- much of it destructive, like things so disparate as drug addiction and young-earth creationism.

Quote:There is also the not so subtle racist element of Nixon’s Southern Strategy that was originally kept relatively quiet but has resurfaced openly in the alt right.  The idea of vanquishing the supposed black urban welfare queen was a key element of Reagan’s unravelling memes, notably the push to not fund domestic services.

Not simple.  There are any number of issues and conflicts in play.  Technology and environment are still changing, though.  We will eventually have to adapt to it, but the pressure for change may be less as we lack a driving issue that demands now.  None the less, there will be progressives attempt to adapt to modern issues, and conservatives attempting to maintain advantageous power structures.  I don’t see that changing.

Old bad memes have a tendency to resurface with new embellishment. But the Alt Right has rediscovered  themes that go back beyond Nixon -- to Hitler and to the slave system of the old South. The Alt Right is undeniably fascist, and the obscene connection of the Nazi swastika to the Confederate flag offends anyone with any decency. Fascism always resurrects a distorted image of the past, typically a melding of otherwise-incongruous threads. Even Nazism tried to connect Germanic Paganism to the Crusades. (I am reasonably satisfied that all of the major Confederate figures would have found Nazism appalling). Americans from conservatives to the Far Left fight it as they fought Nazism and the thuggish cream of an East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere that extended into California and northern Mexico, or it can bring America to defeat. It's easy to see silver linings in the hurricane... such southern cities as Atlanta, Charlotte, Jacksonville, and Memphis could have some impressive Carnival celebrations -- beginning under Brazilian occupation.