If you are a regular (the regular?)
reader of this blog you already know that you should be devoting all your
waking hours to craft a new, healthier dominant reason to replace the
crumbling, failing one that has been keeping Western societies together since
roughly 1750, and the whole world since 1950.
OK, all your waking hours may be a bit
of a stretch, it would still be a worthy and courageous and gallant feat to
devote a few hours a day to such complex endeavor. Problem is, dominant reasons
are defined by being unquestioningly accepted by the vast majority of members of
the societies in which they take hold, which means here and now that for your
(or mine) effort to bear fruit you need to convince about 7 billion people
(give or take a few million here and there) that:
·
The
ultimate goal of their life is wrong, what they have been told a life well
lived consists in is crap, the definitive good they strive for is a poisonous
lie. They need instead to orient all their energies towards “A”
·
The
socially sanctioned desires they have been nurtured to harbor, cherish and
satisfy are internally incoherent, self-defeating and a source of discontent
and dissatisfaction with their own lives. They need instead to start desiring “B”
·
The
criterion for deciding your position (and everybody else’s) in the social
hierarchy, which determines who yields to whom, who gives orders and who obeys,
how the products of the collective efforts are apportioned and who gets
precedence and recognition in every public gathering is unjust, unfair and
illegitimate. We need to substitute it with “C”
Seems like quite a tall order, doesn’t
it? Specially when neither you nor me
have the slightest, darnedest, frigginest idea of what “A”, “B” or “C” look
like. To make things even more difficult, their current configuration, somewhat
obscured by what good ol’ Karl called a “superstructure” that obfuscates its
real nature, has produced a historically unparalleled prosperity and
opportunity for enjoyment between the masses. I don’t want to wax too
rhapsodical about the benefits and advantages of our current system (I already
did in Da System, you know
), but if you want to change the underlying justification that has, in the
first place, conjured literally billions of people into existence (no other
combination of answers to social organization basic questions has proved, in
all of our species history, to produce enough wealth to allow as many of us to be
born and survive into reproductive age) and then lifted so many of them out of
poverty (regardless of what some theorists, mostly of a Marxian bend, may enjoy
pointing out to the soul-crushing, unacceptable, astronomical inequalities of
today’s society, they are nothing special seem from a historical perspective,
and they constitute the norm rather than the exception of how humans tend to
organize their affairs, romanticized imaginings of a “golden age” in our common
past aside), you have to be very sure of what you intend to put in its place,
as it has many, many, many more chances of making things worse than of
improving them (see every experiment of reforming society along entirely new
lines, unburdened by the ideas of the past, of the last three centuries,
practically anywhere in the world).
What I mean with such “justificatory”
reminder (lest my readers forget I tend to group philosophers in two broad
camps, one being the former, the other formed by the “critics”) is that there
is a strong, well intentioned case to be made for a strong conservatism, as any
changes in the basic fabric of social relations (and dominant reason is the
most basic of those fabrics, as it constitutes the pre-condition for people
being able to agree about anything at all) that has brought us here would be
vastly more likely to do harm than good. What I will kindly bring to the
attention of my readers is that we are not in normal times, and caution in this
case may not be the best part of courage, but the proverbial last nail in the
coffin. Having acknowledged that the elements of our dominant reason haven’t
become dominant by sheer luck, but because they also happened to be the ones
that made the societies which embraced them militarily more powerful (and thus
in a Darwinian fashion eliminating those that were more lukewarm in their
adoption), we should also remember that the “fitness” of a system (understood
as the dominant reason that sets the tone of what ideas have chances of being
implemented plus the institutions and customs and mental habits that embody
their implementation) is a function of the environment in which it evolves, and
that the environment has as much to say about how it thrives (or shrivels) as
the system itself.
And what I’ve been arguing in my
last posts about technological stagnation, the decadence and demise of our
social model and the impending doom of most of what we hold dear (a functioning
society, for starters) is that the wild success of desiderative reason has so
much altered the landscape that originally facilitated its bloom as to render
itself entirely “unfit”. What until now has worked so brilliantly to displace
and annihilate any rival system has become completely maladaptive, like a virus
that, having colonized most of the cells of its host organism, has little room
for expansion short of killing it, and thus condemning itself. Consider:
· Demography sucks: There
is no demographic growth, and in the most advanced societies (Japan, Korea,
Singapore, Western Europe, the USA once you take last-generation immigrants
from the birth rolls) there is an accelerating population contraction. This is
not an aftereffect of the 2008 recession, as the tendency had been brewing for
decades. You may search for fancier or fanciest underlying explanations, but I’ll
stick to the simpler one (which I’ve dubbed “the gonadal vote”): for most
people in those societies, life is simply not worth living. They may not
confess it, and even declare to pollsters that their “subjectively perceived
life satisfaction” is a 4 or a 5 in a Likert scale of 5, but facts talk louder
than words, and the surest way to know how they really feel about their life “all
things considered” is to assess to what extent they would fight and exert
themselves to extend it to other people (namely, their children). Applying that
metric, the undeniable answer seems to be “not much, really”.
· Innovation sucks: There
is not much technological advance. I know this assertion goes against the grain
(to put it mildly) and flies in the face of a real deluge of assertions by
journalists and “opinion makers” that insist every single minute and every
single day that we are living in the most wondrous, most “disruptive” of times.
I’ll remind my readers that a career in journalism consists essentially in
acquiring the ability to talk about something you do not understand at all to
people (the proverbial masses) that understand about it even less than you. Any
doubt? Try to read in the MSM (or even in specialized media) a single article
about a subject you are truly knowledgeable about without feeling a) sorry b)
indignant or c) shocked by the amount of stupidity, bias, half-truths, common
places and outright lies it contains. It is safe to assume the rest of the
content is not much better, so extract your own conclusions. So we can safely
ignore what journos say (I’m looking at you, Tom Friedman). Regarding opinion
makers, they all suspiciously hold titles (either consultants or venture
capitalists, or hacks for the former) that make them very likely to benefit
from the anxieties and doubts of a society duped into believing that seismic
changes are just about to submerge them in a sea of unprecedented innovation. I
may devote more time to explain why this society in fact innovates so little
(completely head-over-heels incentives, which reward blatant and naked rent
seeking instead of risk taking), but as of now, just take my word for it.
Please note I’m not saying no invention will
ever again be made. I do not have the slightest clue of what creative
contraptions the fewer and fewer true innovators out there may come up with.
Neither does Mr. Friedman, or Ray Kurzweil or Elon Musk or Peter Thiel (which
doesn’t prevent them from confidently stating that an “AI revolution is just
around the corner”… it is not). What I do have is a strong and well informed
hunch that the majority of “revolutionary” technologies now in the making will
disappoint and fizzle out, that truly disruptive inventions are few and far
between, and that our society requires growing amounts of resources to keep a similar
pace of innovation to the already anemic one we have grown accustomed to, and
that marshaling those resources is gonna be more and more difficult to
accomplish.
· Economics sucks: Even
in the realm in which the societies that embraced desiderative reason excelled,
the production of material goods, there is not much growth. Well, of course, if
demand doesn’t grow (rather the opposite, as there are less and less consumers
around due to demographic contraction) and supply doesn’t become more and more effective
(due to lack of technological advances that have any measurable impact on
productivity, regardless of what brilliant algorithm some kids are developing
to play obscure Asian ancestral games better and better) why, oh, why on God’s
green Earth would you, a responsible industrialist, want to expand your
production? Why incur in the same or more costs (as you can not wring any more productivity
from your current factors of production) if you are not going to be able to
sell more and more products (as there are not going to be more consumers, and
those that are already in the market are not going to have additional income to
spend) and thus obtain greater benefits?
Please note I’m not saying no economy will ever
grow again, and that the current trend
of long recessions followed by underwhelming (albeit sustained) growth periods
will last forever. The whole world right now seems to be in a sweet spot, every
major economy growing and with no major scares in the horizon (just like in
March 2007, isn’t it reassuring?). The West is not growing its GDP at a
dazzling speed (again, compared with the central decades of the XXth century,
that really seem to have utterly spoiled us), but growing it is. Ditto for India,
China and even Latin America. True, and I’m the first one to rejoice in such
blessed state of affairs. But I just don’t see it as either sustainable or
equitably distributed (as 99% of the added production is being hoarded by the
wealthiest 1% of the population, something that has been happening since the 70’s
of last century, as shown in the “chicken graph” I painstakingly devised here: The lies we are told
).So yep, China will experience its ups and downs, more of the former than the
latter. It will hit some major bump in the road, and it may get pretty ugly
(major social upheaval, overthrowing of the CCP, those kind of things), and
then it will resume growth, approaching asymptotically the more advanced
economies (that means: never really completely catching up with them, not in
this century at least). Ditto for India. Western Europe, Japan, Korea,
Singapore, the USA? Minimal growth in per capita terms, and negligible one
aggregated, when seen with enough perspective. Sorry to bring bad news, it is
what it is.
· But politics sucks even more: As
a result of the three previous trends, politics is broken beyond repair. Most groups
have been historically appeased (made to accept their subordinate status) with
the promise of an ever growing economy that would, sooner rather than later, “lift
all boats”. For a good portion of the XXth century (the period between 1945 and
1970) that promise hold (more or less) true. But not any more. At this point,
90% of the population is proletarian (in the Toynbeean, not in the Marxist,
sense). They do not identify themselves with the values, the tastes, the
preferences or the policy choices of the 10% that concentrates roughly 100% of
the wealth (and 80% of the income, static riches are much more unequally
distributed than monetary flows). The 10% favors free trade, open borders,
multiculturalism, a meritocratic distribution of outcomes (heavily biased by
the differences in endowments different people start with in life) and market
based allocation of resources like health services, housing and infrastructure.
The 90% favors protectionism (that right or wrong they associate with better
paid jobs and labor stability) and restrictions to immigration, identifies
chauvinistically with their parochial nation and culture, want to equalize
opportunity and a needs based (communal) allocation of resources that ensures
that everybody receives a bare minimum compatible with human dignity. Or they
will, if the elite hadn’t inadvertently discovered (since the eve of time?)
that the best bridle to the masses redistributionist impulses was to show them
an easily identifiable outgroup that lived worse than them, and that would thus
benefit more from such redistribution. What in the USA so noticeably happens
between the non-college educated whites and other minorities: they have been
taught to associate taxes with improving the lot of blacks and latinos (to the
point of almost reaching their level of consumption), and thus they would
rather slash taxes on the rich and be themselves worse off, as long as said
outgroup is considerably worse off
(the way McCloskey tells it, they choose to have one of their eyes plucked off,
as long as their neighbor has both of theirs plucked).
In this case, I am positively saying that I see
no respite or occasional improvement in the horizon. Lacking a common
understanding of what the good life consists in and how to legitimately pursue
such life, we will continue seeing more and more rent seeking, more and more
outrageous inequality, more and more traditional politicians deaf to their
electorate’s needs (and running for office just to make a buck, or a load of
bucks, from it), more and more “anti-system” parties with no positive program,
kept together by mere scorn and detestation of any particular pet cause that
happens to push their buttons, attracting increasing percentages of the vote
and producing more and more hurtful outcomes (Brexit, Trump, Front Nationale,
whatever, expect more of them…) This is the area where we can more clearly see
that the system is crumbling, that the elites just want to extract as much rent
from everybody else as humanly possible (I’ll expand a bit in how they use
Economics to justify and legitimize such extraction in a forthcoming post),
that the vast majority has been turned into proletarian masses more and more
opposed to such elites, but contented and neutered and unable to offer an
alternative vision of their own, capable only of saying no, distrusting any “expert”
opinion (from climate change to vaccines) and turning to increasingly more
destructive ideologies (from radical Islam to alt-right ethno-phantasies).
Given all that, I hope my readers share at least
a bit of my concern and my urgency for developing a viable alternative reason
that can prevent such dire tendencies, and arrest our slide into ever less
functioning social mores.
But starting to shape such
alternative will, once again, have to wait for another post…
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