Looking back, last year’s writing that hit big was mostly about the Ukrainian crisis. The year before had been about ideology.
Though I intend to write about technology and its effect on society this year, I find I’m slightly at sea.
There is a tendency, when writing about society (either analytically or from the viewpoint of improving–not reforming– it), to fall into one of two camps: “Everything Is Specific” OR “One Ring to Rule Them All.”
Once upon a time my stance was that the US, and the world, had very few problems that were conceptually difficult. They might be technically hard, but what to do was well known.
I haven’t come to disagree with that stance: The sardonic comment that everyone knows that the US needs real universal healthcare remain–it produces better health and costs less. Only the corrupt, the stupid, or the propagandized think otherwise. The same is true of many other problems, from climate change to plastic clogging the seas to fracking, to marginal tax rates, and so on.
We know what would produce a world which was better for the vast majority of people (and animals) living on it. We don’t do those things, except when it becomes profitable. (Solar will start replacing coal because it is cheaper, but it should have and could have been cheaper at least fifteen years ago.)
What I have come to understand is that explaining what needs to be done, and why, is brutally difficult. Getting people to a position where they both want to act on it, and will, is nearly impossible.
You explain one thing (climate change), but it means nothing if you do not link it to other things (industrialization, globalization, financial production incentives, the history of post WWII trade, development economics, inequality). The problems are, in that tired word, “interconnected.”
Most people will never commit to doing the necessary learning to understand how the world works in any meaningful way.
Worse, even if they do, they will likely be mis-educated. They will go to existing intellectual systems like economics and they will be taught theories that are at best partially true and at worse are outright lies. Disciplines, especially academic disciplines, exist because someone is willing to fund them, and whoever that someone is, they have expectations. Business theory; economics; organizational theory, produce what those who are willing to pay for them want. Most of the time, what they want is rationalizations for why they should have more, and let everyone else rot.
So you spend 10 years studying economics, get your PhD, and then get most of everything wrong. Your neo-liberal prescriptions make those parts of the world that take them worse off. (Note, poverty reduction is due to China, China’s success is due to old fashioned mercantalism, not neoliberalism.)
You have an entire discipline based on clearly wrong propositions like humans being utility maximizing machines (and can’t even define utility in a way that doesn’t make it a metaphysical entity). And, applying these theories, you go wrong.
And looking on this edifice; looking on all the ways that people fool themselves or are fooled, is like looking at a jungle and holding only a machete. You aren’t going anywhere without a lot of sweat, and the jungle is just going to close in behind you.
So people turn to one off solutions. If only everyone participates in the gains of an economy it’ll do well. (Well, mostly, but how do you get to that nirvana? This is saying “the world is good if the world is good”.) If only everyone obeys contacts freely entered into, life will be good. (Let’s just completely ignore power imbalances). If only we let markets set prices, the market will produce what we need (but what type of market, we’ve never had free markets setting prices?) If only we have more and better education everyone will be prosperous (so, if everyone has a PhD the economy will be great? What about the half of the population who is below-average intelligence? Fuck’em? And would it work anyway? (No.))
Feel free to insert any “one thing” theory above. They don’t work, or they beg the question. If we had better people, for example, we’d have a better world. But how do we get better people, and what does better even mean?
There have been many attempts to get around these issues. Confucius, Buddha, Jesus, Smith, Marx, Keynes and so many many more have tried.
Some have succeeded for a time: Keynesian economics of the type practices after WWII produced about 25 good years for much of the world (even Africa saw better real growth in that period.) Confucianism, as run by the early Emperors really did make China better till the State co-0pted it. Christianity was the religion of slaves and foreigners and outcasts for centuries, giving their lives meaning, before it became a regressive scourge used to increase the power of Chieftains who wanted to be Kings, take away the rights of women, and be used for justification of mass murder in Europe and the New World.
The solutions which have been effective (which doesn’t always mean making the world a better place) have all spoken to how people should act. We don’t recognize that in modern theories like those of economics, but be clear, homo ec0nomicus is a prescription. The idea that we should act primarily on self interest was not something that was respectable for most of history and the idea that markets should be the primary price setting mechanism and effectively the primary policy mechanism was also considered insane.
The industrial revolution is not old. A little over a couple centuries, for England, a lot less for most other countries. In the course of human existence, this is nothing. The outcome of it, whether it is good or bad, is not yet clear, despite what most believe. If industry and capitalism kill half the population of the world in avoidable climate crises, hunger and drought, while causing a great die-off of non-human plants and animals, can it be said to be good? If, as there is some evidence, it leads to material affluence while increasing rates of depression and unhappiness, is it successful?
The hydraulic revolution, and to a lesser extent the first agricultural revolution (which did not occur along the river valleys) lead to shorter more disease ridden lives and a massive rise in chronic disease and afflictions like having your teeth rot out of your mouth by the time you were 40. In exchange, we received great monuments and lots of things, but I doubt that peasants on the Nile under the Pharoahs were as happy as their ancestors who had lived on the Nile as hunter-gatherers, as close to the Garden of Eden as one can imagine.
I do not believe in going back to technology from before industrialization: it’s not possible or desirable, and if it were, we’d have to reduce our population by two-thirds to three-quarters. Feel free to volunteer to be among the dead.
Pandora’s box is open, and we must deal with the results.
The irony is that we have, again, produced a cornucopia. We have the potential to create an abundance society, the world over and eventually off this world.
We have much of the technology necessary, and we could direct our research and development towards the remaining technology we need.
Instead, we rely on markets controlled by oligarchs and central banks captured by oligarchs to make most of our decisions about our future.
We have systematically dis-empowered ourselves. Going from mass conscription armies and industrial warfare and mass markets driven by relatively egalitarian citizen-consumers in democracies, to oligarchies with unrepresentative armies increasingly filled with drones (and effective ground combat drones will be here in 10 to 20 years), surveillance states bordering on police states, and democracies which are hollow, where we can choose from Oligarchical faction one, two or maybe three. The differences between them, while real, are within the broad agreement to keep giving the rich more.
And so, we come back to, how do we change the direction of our societies? Our society, for the world is more and more one society.
How do we even explain what is wrong, and present a solution, or solutions?
I will posit here that while we may have problems with Confucius’s solution in terms of specifics, in general he was right. We create a new society based on a new ethics (not morality, but ethics); and that ethics is attached to a way of creating a people who can create and maintain that society; and a way of picking the people to run that society who will do so in the interests of everyone else, and not mainly in their own interest.
The thousand and one specific solutions to each problem (housing, energy, health care, climate change) are important, but they are technical questions guided by ideology. A people led by those who do not want to do these things (or not more than they want to do other things), never will.
So is this my “one thing”?
No. It is backed by an understanding of real world power dynamics; an understanding of human nature and how it is and can be shaped; and it is backed by an understanding of the field of ideas and how those ideas are created by the environment and technology: how that tech and environment creates us.
That grouping of ideas is where I believe a solution lies.
Like all solutions, it will not last. The best we can hope for from any solution set, so long as human nature remains as it is, is perhaps a hundred and fifty years. Sixty to eighty is far more typical, and as with the post WWII solution, you may only get two to three decades.
During that time any solution needs to do two things. It need to fix the environment, and it needs to get us off the planet so we don’t have a single point of failure. Doing so will best be done by a system which produces real prosperity, because both of those projects will require vast productive surpluses.
We have or can reach the technology required for both these projects. The challenge of mastering our destiny is the challenge of mastering ourselves, and that challenge is, as it has always been, both the hardest thing anyone can do, and the most worthwhile.
In the New Year I will continue the project of discovering how to do it. I hope you’ll join me.
