I think you might have things backwards. You touch on economics more as an outgrowth of political narratives, but I think that the opposite might be true:
What if we are living through the collapse of the liberal capitalist narrative that has existed since the late 18th century, and the political narrative collapse that you correctly identify is an outgrowth of the lack of an economic vision that describes a better future?
You seem to come close to a deeper discussion about economics as the root when you talk about how the current economic order is created ecological systems collapse while leaving millions or billions of people in near slavery. I was kind of surprised when reading this that you didn't mention any of Mark Fisher's ideas about capitalist realism, specifically him building off a quote from the philosophers Fredric Jameson and Slavoj Žižek "It's easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism", as well as his ideas around a deep nostalgia for a lost future (maybe you aren't familiar with him though).
We seem stuck in that place where nearly everyone can see that things don't work but a lack of imagination about a different future leaves us rehashing old narratives hoping this time they'll work, or accepting strongman narratives of power dynamics and the law of the jungle to try and grab as much as possible so that others can't have it. At the end of the day though, as James Carville said, "It's the economy, stupid."
Using the economic narrative model I'm suggesting, the authoritarians are saying, "see Chinese autocratic quasi-capitalism is strong, we can do that too if we give up on democratic ideas (but pay no attention to the possibility that its all a facade to scare people from challenging them or to the neofeudalist oligopoly that would result if we do that here)", while the old liberal order is saying "uhhh...lets keep doing what we've been doing economically (even though that hasn't worked for millions / billions of people) and uhhh...I guess try and make it suck a little less around the edges", and the political narratives then fall out of those competing economic visions - or lack of vision in the latter.
It's a really really scary thought though, because Jameson and Žižek were totally correct - it really is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of the Westphalian liberal capitalist order. I feel like it might be something you almost considered when writing this, but shied away from it because of the frightening enormity that follows when you actually say it out loud. What does the end of our current concept of liberal capitalism even mean? What does come next? How should we aspire to create a society that delivers better standards of living for everyone while not trashing the planet? What chaos will result as we figure that out?
Also, I'm not saying this to suggest that any old idea like socialism / communism is the prescription either. Those are narratives were responsive to and bound up with the classic-liberal capitalist narrative, and have failed to deliver a better future in their own ways...They are also broken narratives.
Point is, we aren't going to magically get to a successful purely political narrative that works to combat the rising authoritarian tide without that being based on the needs of an economic narrative that gives people a reason to believe that the political implementation of those ideas will actually deliver a better future for people and their families.
Hence why I end with: "the economics and political science professions need to put on their big-people pants and get to work, and give us some truly revolutionary way forward."
In hindsight I'd add to that... the psychology and sociology professions need to revolutionize their thinking as well.
No, we're not going to "magically get to a successful purely political narrative"
All of those are bundled together. They feed off each other, but I disagree with Carville that it's all about the economy. People's perceptions of the economy are driven by deeper story skeletons that influence perception. Plenty of people with good BIdenomics jobs and personal economic security voted for Trump. And plenty of people who hated the economy under Biden are fine with worse conditions under Trump... "I voted for Trump and I'm fine with it" was one quote I saw recently. If they were reacting purely to the objective state of the economy Trump would have lost. Or they'd abandon him now.
I believe there is some greater/deeper narrative driving discontent and disaffection, and when I called for a "Darwin" moment, or a "moonshot" moment, (including perhaps de-growth) that reframes what we consider possible in the world, yes that could mean the end of liberal capitalism... it might mean something else entirely... right now what we have more than anything else is a failure of imagination.
That's why I'm very clear that I don't have the answers to "what's next"... what I am saying is that everything we've tried thus far has at some point led to a dead end... and when it does, democracy ends up suffering. We need something radically new; something well beyond my own imagination. Something that I probably won't live to see.
When I was talking about a lack of belief in the current economics in my comment, I didn't mean more surface level things today's economy is good or bad, or whether people have jobs they like or not. I meant a deeper, more fundamental, disbelief that the current system in its entirety has the capability to benefit most people even with tweaks and changes here or there.
The kind of disbelief where a person might like this or that proposal from either side, and like that something being offered that will benefit them, but at the end of the day they just know that no matter what, the way that the current system of liberal capitalism is set up, they'll be toiling away a job they might hate until they are too old for the system to squeeze value out of and they'll spend their waning years hoping that money and services needed to keep living how they'd like are enough to actually make that happen. For a lot of people, regardless of the politics, that is a bleak bitter pill and no one is really talking about how to change that.
That's fundamental economic narrative collapse. Not good economy or bad, but a loss of belief that the existing economic concept can meaningfully benefit most people's lives instead of just benefiting the few. To me, at this moment, that's the root and everything else flows out from that.
People on both sides have stopped believing, and going back to Mark Fisher, both sides seem to have coupled to that different flavors of philosophical nostalgia.
The right is haunted by the appeal of an ideal imagined past and the message they are getting is that by blindly trusting in authority through the "daddy is going to be in charge" mindset, they'll have someone forcefully remake that past. The authoritarianism comes out of the reality that the imagined past can't fit our reality and has to be forced on the world, and by the lack of belief that the existing economic order can provide enough benefits to make everyone better off - so grab what you can while you can and adopt a bunker mentality. They've given up on an economic vision of the future that is non-zero sum, so its everyone for themselves and keep everyone else out.
On the left it's the "let's keep doing this neo-liberal triangulation thing we've been doing" (that you rightly pointed out isn't going to work), and clinging to ideas that are no longer workable or appeal to the public, out of a nostalgia for a lost future that was promised by those progressive economic and political ideas. Ultimately that doesn't coalesce into something solid because at the end of the day the people trying to craft that narrative don't actually believe that the existing economic order can be reworked enough to satisfactorily ground a better material future. So you get squabbling about social causes and aimless narrative confusion because, they too, are trying to force old economic ideas to fit a reality that doesn't match, and without being able to offer a vision of shared material benefit token social / environmental lip service is what's achievable.
As far as the failure of imagination, I'm kinda surprised that we haven't heard more people talking about the Star Trek future as a vision - i.e. how would a post-scarcity work and is that something possible or even currently reachable. The upside there (after people stop laughing) is that it is an already created narrative, one that is literally a narrative story with all sorts of ethical morality play explorations of issues, that offers a vision of a social and economic future.
I know that Ezra Klein's new book Abundance kind of dips into that, but I haven't read it yet so not sure (though I've seen that some of the criticism is that Klein and Thompson just kinda bolt some "wouldn't this be nice" to existing ideas instead of radically rethinking from the ground up).
Sorry for the delayed replay. I think we're more in agreement than not. I believe that the "surface" things you reference are proxies for the deeper discontent that we both referenced... which is why in the version of this article that ran in The Long Memo, I specifically called out the destruction of people's faith in their own economic future. In that regard, Star Trek is not a laughable narrative. Its post-monetary structure is something so foreign to us we cannot even imagine how the logistics of such a thing could work. That's exactly what I meant when I said that we suffer a failure of imagination, and we should refuse to be limited merely to further iterations of what we already know. I haven't read Abundance either, but probably should as it's getting so much attention. Anyway, as I said, I think we're more in agreement than not. The thoughtful comments are much appreciated.
As for a "new idea" ... haven't a clue. One commenter on version of this article that appeared on The Long Memo said that it might be the impacts of climate change that force us to rethink our concepts of community and growth-based economics... he might be right. It might have to get so physically bad and uncomfortable that people are FORCED to rethink... a new idea might not be enough on its own without our physical reality being bad enough to force us to accept that a new ideas is necessary. (And all that depends on people being informed and educated enough to figure it out; a huge challenge in a time when truth is in short supply and the information ecosystem is so polluted).
Certainly 'The Grapes of Wrath' ('39) served this purpose in some ways. Ecological, economic disaster story... humanity...maybe we _don't_ have to repeat this?...
Followed by decades of classroom reading that probably supported the idea that 'The New Deal' was a noble venture and should be supported, despite costs and imbalances (real or otherwise).
But, is there an 'American Highschool Reading List' any more? Any canon of stories that can (semi)reliably be referenced? Dating myself, 'The Color Purple' was the big addition.
Thanks for reading! I'm not sure I'd go so far as to pick one seminal story. But there is one seminal "storyline." I cover it in the "BIG Big Lie" series. Back in the 1950s fringe conservative activists created a storyline of victimization that has powered conservative identity ever since. They asserted that America is inherently a conservative enterprise (which makes liberalism un-American by definition), and that America had to be saved from the tyranny of big-L Liberal government. Tearing down the edifice of all "activist" governance has been their raison d'être ever since. A good book to read on the topic is Nicole Hemmer's MESSENGERS OF THE RIGHT." In that book, you can see today's conservative revolt already taking shape in the language and ideas of fringe conservatives more than 70 years ago. It just took them a while to convince enough of the electorate to go along with them.
Certainly, academics, think tanks, pundits identify and fine tune the talking points, but no one at the country club, or the factory floor, or the student commons is going to recommend a Heritage Foundation (or RAND, or Gates) white paper as 'a great book you gotta read!'
While the number of times in a windowless conference room I've been asked "have you read The Fountainhead?!?" (1943, now that Ive looked it up) with a 'knowing gaze'... Is countless.
And to be clear, the 'rapture of the Nerds' which we are hurtling towards starts with Neuromancer, jumps to The Matrix and arabesques to Ready Player One. (And yes, guilty of promoting these to others).
Thus, the points you raise makes me wonder if 'the next story' has already been written, but when? 1970? 2023? Add 80 years (1943 to 2024...seems close) and are we looking at the next epoch in... 2050 (70+80) or... 2103 (23+80)?
I see your point. Not sure what I think about that. We're drowning in dystopian fiction and superhero memes (including Neo in the Matrix). So, I think that's where the popular imagination is at the moment. I'm not sure we have a political-economy narrative on the pro-pluralism side yet to do what The Fountainhead did for conservatism.... that is, nothing yet to make an affirmative case for a new way forward. All our current stories end in disaster, or some super-being coming to save us.
My small theory is that broad disasters (meaning multiple groups shared the experience) break down elitism and individualist structures. But since we haven't had a 'broad' disaster since Vietnam... The narrative swings to 'rugged individualists'.
Points in fact being Depression, WW1, WW2, Korea, Vietnam all had a broad burden to share, and required cooperation to succeed. Thus curtailing 'rugged individualist' efforts.
While since Vietnam... Gulf wars, War on Terror, etc have all been all volunteer, thus 'kids from good families' didn't _have_ to interact with others in a human way, and feel a debt of gratitude 'to the working man' 'for saving my ass'.
Additionally, these wars felt like they focused on, and fetishized, small units of Rambo's. Special forces, delta force, SAS, etc. versus the WW2 stories of the 82nd Airborne, the 7th Fleet, etc. furthering the idea that individuals (or small elite teams... 10x coders anyone...) _matter more_ than 'large, sloppy, wasteful groups!'.
I’m not so sure some meta narrative is in store as you state is needed. Rather, I foresee a complete unraveling of the republican form of rule into various collections of states with their own spheres of influence within the U.S. that simply ignore the federal government because it simply won’t be an effective governing entity. There will be factions within states that choose to harm each other, some in the name of MAGA and some on their own path and agenda. But the notion that this band of clowns will be able to suppress 300 million people over this vast a geography is just not going to happen. This will be the great cracking up and people will have to make choices on who to align with. But it’s not going to be the U.S. military imposing the MAGA narrative on us and there just isn’t enough Proud Boys and Oath Keepers to take their place. Even Eric Prince doesn’t have enough goons to do it. So, pick your team for the best chance for survival because it’s not going to be a political party that’s going to lead us during the disintegration.
Finnegan’s The Long Memo has a great piece on Chump’s inability to impose martial law.
I have been playing with the idea that the internet is the 5th communication invention, following language, writing, printing and electricity. It is the first time we have had many-to-many peer-to-peer communications, and it has (along with its many bad effects) the effect of creating a sense of global identity that can replace tribalism. I call this a "one world" attitude.
I've also been playing with the idea that this represents Homo Sapiens Mark II, or H2, which is emerging because evolution is now transmitted via culture more than DNA. How this gets established in the present chaos, I don't know. I am inclined to say it will take root in a post-collapse culture if it can survive.
Unfortunately I think that the "one world" dimension of the internet has broken down into a realm of "infinite siloes." I have a piece coming soon about that fundamental shift in what the internet is and how it operates. Ironically, I think that actually unplugging and reconnecting with the physical world would do a lot to restore a "one world" attitude. And as one commenter posited here: the physical consequences of something like climate change may be the externality that FORCES people to abandon their siloes and work together. I hope the next several generations can make it work better than we have.
I know my view is idealistic, but I also agree with Alex Steffen that "Optimism is a political act." I am inclined to think, on the basis of very little evidence, that the sense of one world is more prevalent today. (Google Ngram would disagree for "one world" and agree for "global".) Previous points might be workers' movements in early 20th C, post-WW II UN, and the hippie movement.
I agree that the world is very siloed right now; FOX News is exhibit #1. Yes, the internet is, too, but some of those silos have a one-world feel, for example, Substack and parts of Reddit.
"climate change may be the externality that FORCES people to abandon their siloes and work together." Yes. We've observed how, after disasters, there is far more helping than looting. We are a social species, and it follows that cooperation is in our nature. The narrative we need, and that has not yet acquired a name, is "one world." If that idea can survive the chaos, post-collapse humans will have a chance.
The problem one runs into is the uniqueness of "culture"... i.e., whether a "one world" vision obliterates individual cultures in favor of a single global culture which right now it materialistic, acquisitive and based on commerce and nothing else -- including buying and selling the artifacts of culture through tourism, food, and other modes of consuming "culture." It's the preservation of unique cultures and cultural content that often is the counterpoint to "one worldism." Whether and how you have both is still unresolved.
I've been thinking a great deal about your comment. I don't expect a universal belief, just as we don't have one right now. I expect the existing frameworks to slowly wither away and come to be seen as historical attitudes, as has happened to the concept of slavery.
I think there will be a one-world view because I do not see any other new possibility. The right and the present left (who are centrist by European standards) will no longer be acceptable. The two poles of communism and capitalism likewise. That only leaves a cooperative model that is the inheritor of the French and American revolutionary idea that all men are created equal. America has moved so far away from that understanding that this idea probably has to arise and be nurtured elsewhere.
I wouldn't put it on the level of new infotechnologies; more like mass media (witness how radio drove the populism of the 30s and TV drove the 60s.) We're closer than we ever were...and that's not always good. At some point, I hope we come to our sense and start to re-assert the right to privacy and boundaries. Unfortunately, I think we're going to get buried in bullshit first.
Let me expand on this a little. Printing introduced a one-to-many style of communication and (in my opinion) was a significant factor in causing the Renaissance. Electricity made communication instantaneous and also broadened the audience, e.g. ABC had a larger audience than any book or newspaper.
The internet is a many-to-many communication tool (in computer jargon, a peer-to-peer protocol) that did not exist before. If books, papers, radio, movies and TV are like lecturers in a hall, the internet is like a party in that space; hundreds of conversations are taking place. The gamers gather in a corner, the sports fans argue, the mothers share tips, etc. I think these are the siloes that @LITERALMAYHEM sees. I'm inclined to say that Narrative A and Narrative B are like lectures.
New modes of communication create great social disruption and take a while to be successfully integrated into society. Humans are still coming to terms with the internet. It has a bad reputation for fake news; this is a consequence of a human characteristic that we unthinkingly accept what we are told. This is how we can pass on huge amounts of information between generations without having to prove every proposition. That may work for children, but as adults, successful use of the internet requires us to acquire critical thinking. Some of those siloes will do so; some won't.
Again, ultimately I think we're more in agreement than not. Though I would disagree that Narrative A and Narrative B are like lectures... to me, those are conversations among like-minded people that evolve and grow (as in the "telephone" game) as the conversation progresses in response to real-world circumstances ("externalities"). Likewise the Internet has a reputation for fake news because it's more and more full of disinformation and misinformation by the day, much of it deliberately placed. I posted two pieces a few weeks back... one is about the rise of "expert inexpert" and the other is about the preference for "uncurated" content as an expression of anti-establishment sentiment. The glorification of "uncurated" media is just giving oneself a license to be dumb, because there's nothing "uncurated" about the Internet, at all. Which brings me into ultimate agreement with your last point that using the Internet requires critical thinking; some siloes will, but I dare to say that most don't and won't. Stay tuned, I have a piece coming in a few weeks on that very topic. Thanks for reading!
Neoliberalism just doesn't have anything to offer anyone who isn't working in tech. And conservatives kept up their ground game, while liberals retreated to the Internet.
I think you might have things backwards. You touch on economics more as an outgrowth of political narratives, but I think that the opposite might be true:
What if we are living through the collapse of the liberal capitalist narrative that has existed since the late 18th century, and the political narrative collapse that you correctly identify is an outgrowth of the lack of an economic vision that describes a better future?
You seem to come close to a deeper discussion about economics as the root when you talk about how the current economic order is created ecological systems collapse while leaving millions or billions of people in near slavery. I was kind of surprised when reading this that you didn't mention any of Mark Fisher's ideas about capitalist realism, specifically him building off a quote from the philosophers Fredric Jameson and Slavoj Žižek "It's easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism", as well as his ideas around a deep nostalgia for a lost future (maybe you aren't familiar with him though).
We seem stuck in that place where nearly everyone can see that things don't work but a lack of imagination about a different future leaves us rehashing old narratives hoping this time they'll work, or accepting strongman narratives of power dynamics and the law of the jungle to try and grab as much as possible so that others can't have it. At the end of the day though, as James Carville said, "It's the economy, stupid."
Using the economic narrative model I'm suggesting, the authoritarians are saying, "see Chinese autocratic quasi-capitalism is strong, we can do that too if we give up on democratic ideas (but pay no attention to the possibility that its all a facade to scare people from challenging them or to the neofeudalist oligopoly that would result if we do that here)", while the old liberal order is saying "uhhh...lets keep doing what we've been doing economically (even though that hasn't worked for millions / billions of people) and uhhh...I guess try and make it suck a little less around the edges", and the political narratives then fall out of those competing economic visions - or lack of vision in the latter.
It's a really really scary thought though, because Jameson and Žižek were totally correct - it really is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of the Westphalian liberal capitalist order. I feel like it might be something you almost considered when writing this, but shied away from it because of the frightening enormity that follows when you actually say it out loud. What does the end of our current concept of liberal capitalism even mean? What does come next? How should we aspire to create a society that delivers better standards of living for everyone while not trashing the planet? What chaos will result as we figure that out?
Also, I'm not saying this to suggest that any old idea like socialism / communism is the prescription either. Those are narratives were responsive to and bound up with the classic-liberal capitalist narrative, and have failed to deliver a better future in their own ways...They are also broken narratives.
Point is, we aren't going to magically get to a successful purely political narrative that works to combat the rising authoritarian tide without that being based on the needs of an economic narrative that gives people a reason to believe that the political implementation of those ideas will actually deliver a better future for people and their families.
Hence why I end with: "the economics and political science professions need to put on their big-people pants and get to work, and give us some truly revolutionary way forward."
In hindsight I'd add to that... the psychology and sociology professions need to revolutionize their thinking as well.
No, we're not going to "magically get to a successful purely political narrative"
All of those are bundled together. They feed off each other, but I disagree with Carville that it's all about the economy. People's perceptions of the economy are driven by deeper story skeletons that influence perception. Plenty of people with good BIdenomics jobs and personal economic security voted for Trump. And plenty of people who hated the economy under Biden are fine with worse conditions under Trump... "I voted for Trump and I'm fine with it" was one quote I saw recently. If they were reacting purely to the objective state of the economy Trump would have lost. Or they'd abandon him now.
I believe there is some greater/deeper narrative driving discontent and disaffection, and when I called for a "Darwin" moment, or a "moonshot" moment, (including perhaps de-growth) that reframes what we consider possible in the world, yes that could mean the end of liberal capitalism... it might mean something else entirely... right now what we have more than anything else is a failure of imagination.
That's why I'm very clear that I don't have the answers to "what's next"... what I am saying is that everything we've tried thus far has at some point led to a dead end... and when it does, democracy ends up suffering. We need something radically new; something well beyond my own imagination. Something that I probably won't live to see.
When I was talking about a lack of belief in the current economics in my comment, I didn't mean more surface level things today's economy is good or bad, or whether people have jobs they like or not. I meant a deeper, more fundamental, disbelief that the current system in its entirety has the capability to benefit most people even with tweaks and changes here or there.
The kind of disbelief where a person might like this or that proposal from either side, and like that something being offered that will benefit them, but at the end of the day they just know that no matter what, the way that the current system of liberal capitalism is set up, they'll be toiling away a job they might hate until they are too old for the system to squeeze value out of and they'll spend their waning years hoping that money and services needed to keep living how they'd like are enough to actually make that happen. For a lot of people, regardless of the politics, that is a bleak bitter pill and no one is really talking about how to change that.
That's fundamental economic narrative collapse. Not good economy or bad, but a loss of belief that the existing economic concept can meaningfully benefit most people's lives instead of just benefiting the few. To me, at this moment, that's the root and everything else flows out from that.
People on both sides have stopped believing, and going back to Mark Fisher, both sides seem to have coupled to that different flavors of philosophical nostalgia.
The right is haunted by the appeal of an ideal imagined past and the message they are getting is that by blindly trusting in authority through the "daddy is going to be in charge" mindset, they'll have someone forcefully remake that past. The authoritarianism comes out of the reality that the imagined past can't fit our reality and has to be forced on the world, and by the lack of belief that the existing economic order can provide enough benefits to make everyone better off - so grab what you can while you can and adopt a bunker mentality. They've given up on an economic vision of the future that is non-zero sum, so its everyone for themselves and keep everyone else out.
On the left it's the "let's keep doing this neo-liberal triangulation thing we've been doing" (that you rightly pointed out isn't going to work), and clinging to ideas that are no longer workable or appeal to the public, out of a nostalgia for a lost future that was promised by those progressive economic and political ideas. Ultimately that doesn't coalesce into something solid because at the end of the day the people trying to craft that narrative don't actually believe that the existing economic order can be reworked enough to satisfactorily ground a better material future. So you get squabbling about social causes and aimless narrative confusion because, they too, are trying to force old economic ideas to fit a reality that doesn't match, and without being able to offer a vision of shared material benefit token social / environmental lip service is what's achievable.
As far as the failure of imagination, I'm kinda surprised that we haven't heard more people talking about the Star Trek future as a vision - i.e. how would a post-scarcity work and is that something possible or even currently reachable. The upside there (after people stop laughing) is that it is an already created narrative, one that is literally a narrative story with all sorts of ethical morality play explorations of issues, that offers a vision of a social and economic future.
I know that Ezra Klein's new book Abundance kind of dips into that, but I haven't read it yet so not sure (though I've seen that some of the criticism is that Klein and Thompson just kinda bolt some "wouldn't this be nice" to existing ideas instead of radically rethinking from the ground up).
Sorry for the delayed replay. I think we're more in agreement than not. I believe that the "surface" things you reference are proxies for the deeper discontent that we both referenced... which is why in the version of this article that ran in The Long Memo, I specifically called out the destruction of people's faith in their own economic future. In that regard, Star Trek is not a laughable narrative. Its post-monetary structure is something so foreign to us we cannot even imagine how the logistics of such a thing could work. That's exactly what I meant when I said that we suffer a failure of imagination, and we should refuse to be limited merely to further iterations of what we already know. I haven't read Abundance either, but probably should as it's getting so much attention. Anyway, as I said, I think we're more in agreement than not. The thoughtful comments are much appreciated.
Agree that won't be easy to put Humpty Dumpty back together again easily. Unfortunately, IMHO it will have to get much worse before it gets better.
I'd agree on that. As I said in the version of this article that appeared in The Long Memo... "this haunted house ride is just getting started"...
Fascinating.
A few questions, if I may:
Would you consider 'Atlas Shrugged' (57) and/or 'Gravitys Rainbow' (73) as the seminal story for this current restructuring?
If the declining epoch lasted 80 years, what's your guesstimate for the new idea?
Again, fascinating. Thanks for this.
As for a "new idea" ... haven't a clue. One commenter on version of this article that appeared on The Long Memo said that it might be the impacts of climate change that force us to rethink our concepts of community and growth-based economics... he might be right. It might have to get so physically bad and uncomfortable that people are FORCED to rethink... a new idea might not be enough on its own without our physical reality being bad enough to force us to accept that a new ideas is necessary. (And all that depends on people being informed and educated enough to figure it out; a huge challenge in a time when truth is in short supply and the information ecosystem is so polluted).
Certainly 'The Grapes of Wrath' ('39) served this purpose in some ways. Ecological, economic disaster story... humanity...maybe we _don't_ have to repeat this?...
Followed by decades of classroom reading that probably supported the idea that 'The New Deal' was a noble venture and should be supported, despite costs and imbalances (real or otherwise).
But, is there an 'American Highschool Reading List' any more? Any canon of stories that can (semi)reliably be referenced? Dating myself, 'The Color Purple' was the big addition.
Thanks for reading! I'm not sure I'd go so far as to pick one seminal story. But there is one seminal "storyline." I cover it in the "BIG Big Lie" series. Back in the 1950s fringe conservative activists created a storyline of victimization that has powered conservative identity ever since. They asserted that America is inherently a conservative enterprise (which makes liberalism un-American by definition), and that America had to be saved from the tyranny of big-L Liberal government. Tearing down the edifice of all "activist" governance has been their raison d'être ever since. A good book to read on the topic is Nicole Hemmer's MESSENGERS OF THE RIGHT." In that book, you can see today's conservative revolt already taking shape in the language and ideas of fringe conservatives more than 70 years ago. It just took them a while to convince enough of the electorate to go along with them.
Certainly, academics, think tanks, pundits identify and fine tune the talking points, but no one at the country club, or the factory floor, or the student commons is going to recommend a Heritage Foundation (or RAND, or Gates) white paper as 'a great book you gotta read!'
While the number of times in a windowless conference room I've been asked "have you read The Fountainhead?!?" (1943, now that Ive looked it up) with a 'knowing gaze'... Is countless.
And to be clear, the 'rapture of the Nerds' which we are hurtling towards starts with Neuromancer, jumps to The Matrix and arabesques to Ready Player One. (And yes, guilty of promoting these to others).
Thus, the points you raise makes me wonder if 'the next story' has already been written, but when? 1970? 2023? Add 80 years (1943 to 2024...seems close) and are we looking at the next epoch in... 2050 (70+80) or... 2103 (23+80)?
Again, good stuff.
Thoughts?
I see your point. Not sure what I think about that. We're drowning in dystopian fiction and superhero memes (including Neo in the Matrix). So, I think that's where the popular imagination is at the moment. I'm not sure we have a political-economy narrative on the pro-pluralism side yet to do what The Fountainhead did for conservatism.... that is, nothing yet to make an affirmative case for a new way forward. All our current stories end in disaster, or some super-being coming to save us.
My small theory is that broad disasters (meaning multiple groups shared the experience) break down elitism and individualist structures. But since we haven't had a 'broad' disaster since Vietnam... The narrative swings to 'rugged individualists'.
Points in fact being Depression, WW1, WW2, Korea, Vietnam all had a broad burden to share, and required cooperation to succeed. Thus curtailing 'rugged individualist' efforts.
While since Vietnam... Gulf wars, War on Terror, etc have all been all volunteer, thus 'kids from good families' didn't _have_ to interact with others in a human way, and feel a debt of gratitude 'to the working man' 'for saving my ass'.
Additionally, these wars felt like they focused on, and fetishized, small units of Rambo's. Special forces, delta force, SAS, etc. versus the WW2 stories of the 82nd Airborne, the 7th Fleet, etc. furthering the idea that individuals (or small elite teams... 10x coders anyone...) _matter more_ than 'large, sloppy, wasteful groups!'.
More to ponder.... Thanks.
I’m not so sure some meta narrative is in store as you state is needed. Rather, I foresee a complete unraveling of the republican form of rule into various collections of states with their own spheres of influence within the U.S. that simply ignore the federal government because it simply won’t be an effective governing entity. There will be factions within states that choose to harm each other, some in the name of MAGA and some on their own path and agenda. But the notion that this band of clowns will be able to suppress 300 million people over this vast a geography is just not going to happen. This will be the great cracking up and people will have to make choices on who to align with. But it’s not going to be the U.S. military imposing the MAGA narrative on us and there just isn’t enough Proud Boys and Oath Keepers to take their place. Even Eric Prince doesn’t have enough goons to do it. So, pick your team for the best chance for survival because it’s not going to be a political party that’s going to lead us during the disintegration.
Finnegan’s The Long Memo has a great piece on Chump’s inability to impose martial law.
The "end of history" is over.
I have been playing with the idea that the internet is the 5th communication invention, following language, writing, printing and electricity. It is the first time we have had many-to-many peer-to-peer communications, and it has (along with its many bad effects) the effect of creating a sense of global identity that can replace tribalism. I call this a "one world" attitude.
I've also been playing with the idea that this represents Homo Sapiens Mark II, or H2, which is emerging because evolution is now transmitted via culture more than DNA. How this gets established in the present chaos, I don't know. I am inclined to say it will take root in a post-collapse culture if it can survive.
Unfortunately I think that the "one world" dimension of the internet has broken down into a realm of "infinite siloes." I have a piece coming soon about that fundamental shift in what the internet is and how it operates. Ironically, I think that actually unplugging and reconnecting with the physical world would do a lot to restore a "one world" attitude. And as one commenter posited here: the physical consequences of something like climate change may be the externality that FORCES people to abandon their siloes and work together. I hope the next several generations can make it work better than we have.
I know my view is idealistic, but I also agree with Alex Steffen that "Optimism is a political act." I am inclined to think, on the basis of very little evidence, that the sense of one world is more prevalent today. (Google Ngram would disagree for "one world" and agree for "global".) Previous points might be workers' movements in early 20th C, post-WW II UN, and the hippie movement.
I agree that the world is very siloed right now; FOX News is exhibit #1. Yes, the internet is, too, but some of those silos have a one-world feel, for example, Substack and parts of Reddit.
"climate change may be the externality that FORCES people to abandon their siloes and work together." Yes. We've observed how, after disasters, there is far more helping than looting. We are a social species, and it follows that cooperation is in our nature. The narrative we need, and that has not yet acquired a name, is "one world." If that idea can survive the chaos, post-collapse humans will have a chance.
The problem one runs into is the uniqueness of "culture"... i.e., whether a "one world" vision obliterates individual cultures in favor of a single global culture which right now it materialistic, acquisitive and based on commerce and nothing else -- including buying and selling the artifacts of culture through tourism, food, and other modes of consuming "culture." It's the preservation of unique cultures and cultural content that often is the counterpoint to "one worldism." Whether and how you have both is still unresolved.
I've been thinking a great deal about your comment. I don't expect a universal belief, just as we don't have one right now. I expect the existing frameworks to slowly wither away and come to be seen as historical attitudes, as has happened to the concept of slavery.
I think there will be a one-world view because I do not see any other new possibility. The right and the present left (who are centrist by European standards) will no longer be acceptable. The two poles of communism and capitalism likewise. That only leaves a cooperative model that is the inheritor of the French and American revolutionary idea that all men are created equal. America has moved so far away from that understanding that this idea probably has to arise and be nurtured elsewhere.
I wouldn't put it on the level of new infotechnologies; more like mass media (witness how radio drove the populism of the 30s and TV drove the 60s.) We're closer than we ever were...and that's not always good. At some point, I hope we come to our sense and start to re-assert the right to privacy and boundaries. Unfortunately, I think we're going to get buried in bullshit first.
In many ways "closer" as in "more connected" through media, but in other ways never been as far away in terms of living in siloes.
Let me expand on this a little. Printing introduced a one-to-many style of communication and (in my opinion) was a significant factor in causing the Renaissance. Electricity made communication instantaneous and also broadened the audience, e.g. ABC had a larger audience than any book or newspaper.
The internet is a many-to-many communication tool (in computer jargon, a peer-to-peer protocol) that did not exist before. If books, papers, radio, movies and TV are like lecturers in a hall, the internet is like a party in that space; hundreds of conversations are taking place. The gamers gather in a corner, the sports fans argue, the mothers share tips, etc. I think these are the siloes that @LITERALMAYHEM sees. I'm inclined to say that Narrative A and Narrative B are like lectures.
New modes of communication create great social disruption and take a while to be successfully integrated into society. Humans are still coming to terms with the internet. It has a bad reputation for fake news; this is a consequence of a human characteristic that we unthinkingly accept what we are told. This is how we can pass on huge amounts of information between generations without having to prove every proposition. That may work for children, but as adults, successful use of the internet requires us to acquire critical thinking. Some of those siloes will do so; some won't.
Again, ultimately I think we're more in agreement than not. Though I would disagree that Narrative A and Narrative B are like lectures... to me, those are conversations among like-minded people that evolve and grow (as in the "telephone" game) as the conversation progresses in response to real-world circumstances ("externalities"). Likewise the Internet has a reputation for fake news because it's more and more full of disinformation and misinformation by the day, much of it deliberately placed. I posted two pieces a few weeks back... one is about the rise of "expert inexpert" and the other is about the preference for "uncurated" content as an expression of anti-establishment sentiment. The glorification of "uncurated" media is just giving oneself a license to be dumb, because there's nothing "uncurated" about the Internet, at all. Which brings me into ultimate agreement with your last point that using the Internet requires critical thinking; some siloes will, but I dare to say that most don't and won't. Stay tuned, I have a piece coming in a few weeks on that very topic. Thanks for reading!
Neoliberalism just doesn't have anything to offer anyone who isn't working in tech. And conservatives kept up their ground game, while liberals retreated to the Internet.