Category: Social Change

Civilization, Erasure, and Immaculate Conceptions

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Jeff Koons’ Venus figure from Barcelona’s MOCO Museum. You can see me with my phone trapped in her belly.

There is a persistent fear of societal erasure that permeates contemporary social and cultural criticism. South Korea, Taiwan, Italy, and Eastern Europe all have very low birthrates and face the reality of drastic change or erasure in the next fifty or so years. Even the leaden National Security Strategy (NSS) document of the Trump administration outright proclaims there is a “stark prospect of civilizational erasure” in Europe due to low birthrates and immigration. In the United States there is worry over young people not being interested in sex, and birthrates, while not as low as in other countries, have not been at replacement rate for more than a decade. Among working-class whites in America, young women often just find their male counterparts not good husband or father material. The same is true of college-educated women, who increasingly outnumber their slacker male counterparts

Some commentators reflect that what is needed is a religious revival that somehow reverses the liberation of women and gets them back to raising children in a celebration of God’s aims. Less dreamy policy ideas include paying couples for children and eliminating the economic barriers to working women who have children.

There is, of course, an inherent racism built into some of these fears; the thought is that American or Japan or Italy are losing something important if waves of immigrants gradually come to dominate the civilizations. The decline and fall of Western civilization is driven not by the LA punk scene but by this nebulous replacement idea driven by some kind of global elite (often with antisemitic overtones).… Read the rest

Against Nostalgia

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Some conservatives carry on even as the bizarro world continues to invert reality on Trump’s watch. Over at National Review they are kvetching about state and local regulations for hair stylists. Damn, look at the market distortions! If only we could unlock that 1/2 of 1/10th of a percent of the market we would achieve libertarian liberation! Meanwhile, Donald Trump is taking an ownership stake in Intel and imposing export tariffs on Nvidia like a socialist dictator. And David Brooks at New York Times proclaims that cultural factors override the role of money in terms of making or breaking the success of people. If only we were more…Swedish we would not have to descend into nihilistic doom cycles.

It’s not that these aren’t partially true, of course, but merely that they are shadow-boxing on an old battlefield filled with muskets and cannonballs. The new war has moved on.

This inverted reality calls for something different. The notion that we can reclaim social stability through nostalgia or micro-microeconomics lacks sensibility, credibility, and honesty. We live in a modern world where even core concepts like the reliability of the Gospels is widely distrusted, which in part explains the increasing view of Christian institutions as centers of manipulation and cruelty. There never was any there there, just shadowy programming and ignorance before the internet era. Get them young enough and they can be groomed, like Epstein’s victims. The critical role of culture and institutions was always as fragile as the communications and information systems that supported it. Now there is nothing but the dark potential of power.

And here I am, so negative! And just after inventing my own religion built around trust and optimizing our personal and group engagement with the state and the world.… Read the rest

After Z

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The nights and days collide with violence. There is the nocturnal me and the dazed, daylight version squinting away from the glaring windows. There are the catnaps that lace with riotous algebras. I am addicted to caffeine, or run on it, until even it becomes unpersuasive, and I droop over at the keyboard. Then this pulse of creation pulls me out again, stunned for a few beats, and I grasp my mug and stumble back to the lab floor.

Z keeps changing, day by day, midnights into dawns, and reawakening in clanging novelty. Z is for “zombie,” for it is in the uncanny valley of both a physical and cogitating thing. It perceives, stands, jogs in place beside me on the laboratory floor, an ochre braid of wires bouncing in a dreadlock mass behind it. Z plays chess, folds towels (how hard that was!), argues politics (how insane is that one!), and constantly restructures nuances in its faces and gestures. Sometimes I’m tired and Z is an impertinent teenager. Often there are substitutions and semantic scrambling like a foreigner who mistakes a word for another, then carries on in a fugue of incoherence.

There is a half-acre of supercooled GPUs to the north of the lab where the hot churn of work is happening. It’s a spread of parallel dreamscapes, each funneled the new daily stimuli, stacking them into a training pool, then rerunning the simulations, splitting and recombining, then trying again to minimize the incoherency, the errors, and the size of the model. Of the ten thousand fermenting together, one becomes the new Z for a few hours, but then is gone again by morning, replaced by a child of sorts that harbors the successes but sheds the excesses and broken motifs.… Read the rest

The Hard Problem of the Future

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The American zeitgeist is obsessed with decline and a curious sense of ennui. On the progressive left there is the rolling mortal threat of inequality and the destruction of the middle class. Wages don’t keep up with inflation or, more broadly, the cost of living. On the new MAGA right there is an unfocused rage that builds in part on the angst of hollowed-out rural and post-industrial communities, and then in part on undocumented immigrants as scapegoats and symbolic of lefty lawlessness, and again in part as a tirade against wealthy, coastal elites who control the media, universities, and have pushed the Overton window in incremental lurches towards inclusiveness. The populism is mostly half-baked, certainly, and exploited by cynical conservatives for undermining social support while bolstering commercial interests and reducing taxes for the well-to-do. But half-baked is enough for a sensibility; things fully realized are only afterthoughts.

There are other chthonic rumblings and imputations that filter up. The rise of China’s industrial, military, and scientific power is a growing shadow that some see threatening to engulf the world in its umbra. And with it comes the fear of slowing technological might, despite the domination of the recent technological present by the United States. We might be left behind like unhoused, opioid-addicted, modern peasants. The crumbling of the cities would be just punishment even if their loss only cascades the problems of the heartland.

And so as the future keeps getting harder, we turn to mad kings who promise radical change in the face of hard problems. The change can’t possibly be realized, so it is better to just pretend that there are solutions. Annex Greenland, rename the Gulf of Mexico, incorporate Canada, occupy Panama, reach for Mars, acquire territory, but all the while cocooned by the complex institutional and international realities that mean that acting aggressively and alone is now untenable.… Read the rest

Studying for Exceptionalism

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Caustic modern American politics has arisen in the new metaverse of communications technologies. Everyone has an opinion and shares it. This perhaps leads to pervasive unhappiness with any kind of governance. There’s always something to bitch about because real change is both hard and always has winners and losers of some sort. But what do the happiest countries in the world do differently than those of us in the second and lower tiers? Worth reading is the seventh chapter of the World Happiness Report titled “The Nordic Exceptionalism.” Finland, Denmark, Sweden, Iceland, and Norway are all at the top, along with Switzerland, New Zealand, and Austria. And what do these countries do right that makes them so exceptional in terms of happiness? Well, it’s not due to some of the suggested culprits like low immigrant rates and cultural uniformity or high rates of suicide culling out the unhappy. It’s also not clearly due to lower levels of income inequality compared with peer countries. The effect of inequality on happiness appears to correlate with GDP per capita and is reduced in impact by the presence of a generous welfare state; it contributes but is not central.

Instead, important factors include trust in social institutions and low rates of corruption. People in these countries also feel freer than in peer countries, including the United States. Their overall life satisfaction levels are very high and have much lower variation within the populace than countries like ours, as well. Part of the sense of freedom may arise from the generosity of the welfare states by reducing the risk of exploring life options, which is also a side-effect of wealth in these countries.

A dive into potential root causes reveals some surprises, like:

Another important underlying factor might have been mass education.

… Read the rest

Uncommon Goods

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In the days before Trump’s inauguration we can see some of the reflections of alt-right and conspiratorial ideas crawling ashore from febrile ponds. They range from mildly-incoherent free-wheeling-conspiratorial (Peter Thiel), to narrowly self-serving Libertarian-light (Marc Andreessen), to often contradictory, racist, and cruel (Curtis Yarvin). What should be asked about each is what vision they have of a common good for America and, though they and the MAGA movement are largely focused on our country, how also the larger world might benefit or change as a result of a new form of American engagement with the world. The idea of a common good is an old one that has been brought back into vogue by some social and legal theorists, like the “common good constitutionalist” Adrian Vermuele who I wrote about previously. For Vermuele there is a common good in redistributing land and resources to help the poor as well as in the government restricting and limiting free speech to enforce his concept (informed by his Catholicism) of morality in thought and action.

In radical contrast we have the new MAGA commentariat. There are some fundamental contradictions at the heart of the MAGA braintrust. On the one hand, they see a runaway federal government that hides facts and strong-arms business leaders with threats of regulation and lawsuits. The government and the establishment media and universities support activism by positioning themselves as the fact-sifters and thought leaders. Andreessen complains that educated workers demand too much from his companies. They want environmental and sustainability commitments. They want DEI policies. They want positions on global affairs and worldwide LGBTQ+ rights. It’s annoying to Andreessen and makes entrepreneurship too complicated.… Read the rest

Rise, Teleonomatons!

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My essay for the Berggruen Prize this year. Of course, the organization missed an opportunity to drop down a staggering rabbit hole and lean into a whole new regime of neologistic energetics, but I do like the prize-winning essays!

Rise, Teleonomatons

Meaning entanglements

I can’t figure out what some statements about science mean, though I have a fair background in a range of scientific areas. Now, I can peruse highly technical papers, browse abstracts, interpret graphs, study conclusions, and typically do just fine. The professional stuff is a procession of arid facts and assumes the reader knows the basic definitions for things. It’s the popular versions of scientific insights that befuddle me—especially the definitions that try mightily to bridge meanings for learners. So do introductory texts. Light is a wave? Not exactly. Atoms are particles? Well, not quite, but they are small. Electrons orbit the nucleus? No, really, no. A force is an influence tending to change the motion of a body? OK, but what is an influence? People are influenced, aren’t they? Or under the influence.

And then there are texts like those of existential philosophers that leave me completely befuddled. What is this “Being” that they write about and how did it get so enlarged in significance, capitalized, and shoehorned by the translator into incomprehensible juxtapositions with other bulbous words?

It may be low pedantry to expect clarity from words and writing. We generally just roll with it and use the terms according to conventions inferred from reading and learning. We rush over the imperfect metaphorical bridges, the analogies, the similes. For physics, definitions are bound to the equations and measurement properties that accompany the words of description, and they become a semantic pier that is constantly informing our relationship with the ideas.… Read the rest

A Manifold of Non-Tiresome Heavens

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It’s the rage these days to wax indignant over the rise of authoritarian figures around the world. From Trump to Putin, Victor Orban, and the right-wing parties of Europe, the fear is that our experiment in post-World War II and then post-Cold War liberalism is at risk of being distorted and abraded by a desire for cultural uniformity. A common refrain is that the visibility of and legal restructuring around LGBTQ+ and ethnic/minority communities, as well as a sprinkling of environmentalism, is moving so quickly that a slight majority of the electorate wants to stand in the path of change “yelling stop,” to paraphrase Bill Buckley. Ripple effects then will break down the slow-built institutions that define contemporary liberal democracies and soon we have concentration camps for dissenters.

In America, there are nostalgic swoons for Ronald Reagan and some idealized middle-class heaven from the economic growth-phase of the 1950s when everyone went to church and the worst swear word was “golly gee!” The uniformity and comfort that people felt about their roles in their communities combined with a bedrock belief in family, faith, and devotion to country that was as reliable as America’s continuous economic growth. It was good to be alive and all the backward peoples of the world would maybe someday catch up if they didn’t all die of famine first.

But I can never quite understand what those who lean authoritarian want for their future world? I call most of the hypothetical visions “tiresome heavens” because they reflect the old joke of how Christian heaven must be a monotonous, uniform place. Just sit around in perfect blissful union with one’s Creator. Nothing really to do, no stressors, no wants, no struggles; it is a transcendent promise that is more geologic than human.… Read the rest

Humility is Pervasive

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We are having an intimate holiday season with food, family, and small adventures along the Oregon coast. There were hints of Christmas with presents and music, as well as new Yule poetry that celebrates the cycles of the ocean in a natural dialogue with the seasonal flow: “King tides pull the world upward / … / Whales coast through gabled waters…” And then there are the swirling culture wars out there somewhere trying to deny us our diverse ideas and new traditions. We don’t worry much about their misdirection, but find the lack of creativity disheartening. Why not learn and invent new ways of thinking about society and culture?

Rabbi David Wolpe at Harvard Divinity has a more historical and intellectualized take on modern life in the Atlantic where he tries to collapse all the complexity of modern political instincts into an amalgam about insufficient humility about our own ideas and capabilities. I like critiquing these kinds of intellectual histories because I am humble enough to doubt that singular ideas can explain all the myriad ways of flourishing in human history. “The Return of the Pagans” maps the contemporary left with their environmental worship—and the right with heroic icons like Donald Trump—to something like the Greco-Roman idolization of beauty, power, wealth, and creativity. It is the invention of monotheism that focused the ancient mind on a singular divinity that we poor humans can always prostrate our tiny plans before. Elon Musk shouldn’t strain to get to Mars. Tech Bros shouldn’t accelerate technological change without deep humility about the impact on society. The ultra-wealthy used to be more concerned for using their wealth for good. Everyone should instead contemplate their imperfect sin-nature in the face of perfection.… Read the rest

Reverse Engineering the Future

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I’ve been enjoying streaming Apple TV+’s Foundation based on Asimov’s classic books. The show is very different from the high-altitude narrative of the books and, frankly, I couldn’t see it being very engaging if it had been rendered the way the books were written. The central premise of predictability of vast civilizations via “psychohistory” always struck me as outlandish, even as a teen. From my limited understanding of actual history it seemed strange that anything that happened in the past fit anything but the roughest of patterns. I nevertheless still read all the “intellectual history” books that come out in the hope that there are underlying veins that explain the surface rocks strewn chaotically across the past. Cousin marriage bans leads to the rise of individualism? Geography is the key? People want to mimic one another? Economic inequality is the actual key?

Each case is built on some theoretical insight that is stabilized by a broad empirical scaffolding. Each sells some books and gets some play in TED and book reviews. But then they seem to pass away out of public awareness because the fad is over and there are always new ideas bubbling up. But maybe that’s because they can’t help us predict the future exactly (well, Piketty perhaps…see below). But what can?

The mysterious world of stocks and bonds is an area where there seems to be no end to speculation (figuratively and literally) about ways to game the system and make money, or even to understand macroeconomic trends. It’s not that economics doesn’t have some empirical powers, it’s just that it still doesn’t have the kind of reliability that we expect from the physical sciences.… Read the rest