So, how long can we count on having the Internet?

Back from very refreshing holidays, which I badly needed this year, as I may have taken a few more commitments of late than what wisdom would dictate (probably my very occasional readers have noticed, as from a blogging perspective it has been a year of truly abysmal productivity). And things are only going to get more hectic for the following couple of months. But there are a number of things I’ve been thinking about that I wanted to share with my devoted readership, and this is a moment as good as any other to get at it.

First and foremost in my mind has been how the likely collapse of our civilization may play out. There are a couple of lines of thought that I had been harboring for some time now, and for which I have found a lot of additional supporting evidence in these past months:

·         Technological advance has really and completely petered out. I visited in July a factory in the Basque Country that builds superconducting magnets. I still can remember the buzz about superconductance almost forty years ago. Back then, it seemed that developing materials that would superconduct at ambient temperature (or at least, at a temperature that allowed them to be cooled w liquid nitrogen, which is comparatively unexpensive) was just a matter of time, and a short one at that (think years, not decades). Just hasn’t happened. This particular factory supplies the sextupoles for one of humanity’s greatest achievements, the Large Hadron Collider, in CERN near Geneva. Amazing little pieces of equipment of almost magical qualities… exactly like the ones that my mother tested in her old laboratory when I was but a sparkle of possibility in God’s eyes. It tells you something that the most advanced equipment, for the most advanced scientific installation on planet Earth, relies on a technology that essentially has experienced no improvement at all in the last half century. Add it to the long list of fields (energy production, space exploration, air transportation, land transit, building materials, etc.)  that have experienced almost no evolution since the 70s of last century.

·         About the other great technological undertaking at planetary level, seeing the latest news from ITER, I’ve lost faith that it will ever be completed. They still have not started the truly difficult part (actually building the cryostat), and the societal know-how to achieve it at the budgeted cost and time has simply evaporated. There is not in the whole Europe enough people with the required skill to design in detail, weld, erect and connect the myriad parts, with the demanded quality and precision  (and I doubt they can find enough, even in Asia, where thanks to China and Korea still building conventional NPPs  there are more engineers and tradesmen with the requisite skills). It is just a matter of how many more years (or decades) it will take them to realize that there is not enough collective willpower to see it through, and quietly dump the whole thing (and with it, the dream of endless, cheap, clean energy that fusion embodied)

·         Climate change is already baked in, taking place, and there is absolutely no way to stop it as, taken globally, people just don’t want it to stop (or, more precisely, to make the sacrifices that would be needed). First piece of data, I travelled to Saudi Arabia, and talked to some people in the energy sector. They smile benevolently when asked if they are not nervous by the prospect of the advanced economies “weaning off oil” and substantially reducing their dependence on their main export, which provides them with 99% of their revenue. They have heard that tune since… you guessed it, since the first oil crisis (coincidentally, at the beginning of the 70s of last century, when technological progress almost stopped) and said advanced economies have “only” increased the total amount of oil they use fourfold. Plus China, and India, and Latin America, and even parts of Africa are building sizeable middle classes which want to celebrate their arrival to wealth and prosperity with what has been sold to them as the ultimate symbol of affluence: a car! (and, 99% of the time, the first one they can afford, which renders them the mobility and convenience of a self-propelling vehicle, is still one with an internal combustion engine). Second piece of data, we have lived through one of the hottest summers on record (I experienced it firsthand in the typically balmy North of Spain, sweltering under temperatures of 40º C, and by having the ancestral home of my parents almost burned down by one of the fiercest wildfires on record in the Canary Islands, an inevitable byproduct of high temperatures and very low humidity). 

·         Just how longer can entire ecosystems survive a repetition of such thermal stress (slightly augmented each passing year) is anybody’s guess. And people are content blaming it all on politicians that don’t take the whole thing seriously (which they don’t), but at the same time they still keep buying themselves ever larger and less efficient vehicles (I keep on seeing more and more SUVs all over Europe), demanding ever more air conditioning in the Summer, and buying bigger and bigger homes, even if it means living further from their works (and the schools of their children) and forcing them to longer commutes, in which, apart from making themselves unhappier, consume tons more of hydrocarbons. Why shouldn’t they? They have been falsely promised (between so many other things) that the whole energy production network can be revamped, that old, polluting, ways of producing energy (coal and nuclear) can be scrapped and replaced by cleaner ones (wind and solar) without anybody paying any price. So they just go along, waiting the inevitable (clean energy for everybody everywhere) to materialize without them making any sacrifice. Only this time the inevitable happens to be also impossible (in the current state of actual technology, as opposed to the one dreamed by most journalists, pundits that should know better and of course politicians)…

In summary, our civilization is agonizing, incapable of providing technical solutions to its most pressing problems, and condemned to adapt to the deteriorating conditions of a warming planet. At this point I think +2ºC in 2050 is unavoidable (as it should be clear by now that none of the signatories of the Paris treaty, except maybe the smallest ones, who contribute the less to greenhouse gasses emissions, are going to meet their lofty commitments, and thinking otherwise is just delusional), and +3ºC, even +4ºC are not entirely off the table. The train for avoiding such outcome simply left the station long ago, and it is better to recognize it than to stick to the pied piper’s dream of everybody suddenly realizing how serious the threat is, and coordinately engaging in the biggest reengineering the world has ever seen of how we produce energy, heat our homes, produce our food and transport merchandises (and ourselves) around.

A number of books have been published painting in (sometimes excruciating) detail how such warming planet may look like, normally in apocalyptic tones: billions displaced as their cities and villages are submerged by the rising sea levels, millions starving due to the inability to grow enough foodstuffs amidst catastrophic droughts, most of Earth’s wildlife (both animals and plants) perishing due to inability to adapt to the changes in their habitats… From the human perspective, it all would sound quite scary except for one reason: we have heard (most of) it all before, and it never came to pass. The displacements, famines, wars, societal upheaval, civilizational collapse and (probable) final extinction of the human species was already forecasted as an unavoidable fate by the “Club of Rome” in… the 70s of the last century! (a most fateful decade, as you may have realized), when there were about 3 billion of us on the planet. And today we are 7 billion (and counting), mostly enjoying a much higher standard of living than we were back then, without any of the authors, as far as I know, ever recognizing there was anything wrong in their predictions (Paul Ehrlich, another famous doomsayer of the era, only admits that he may have been wrong in “a few decades”, as according to him all his gloomy predictions of collapse will surely come to pass more or less as he foretold, sooner rather than later). Like in the tale of the boy who cried wolf, we have been admonished to change our wasteful ways or else, without nothing bad happening (rather the opposite, with untold numbers getting out of poverty and joining the global middle classes, mostly thanks to the fast rise of China, that more than compensates the inability of the Western world to improve a iota the lot of 80-90% of its population in the last half century) and the result is that society is jaded and unresponsive to the latest warnings. “This time is different (as now the wolf is really coming!)” becomes less convincing in each iteration.

So we are essentially cooked, right? Well, maybe not so much. Although in some sense we are in a much worse position than in the 70s (back then we could still innovate and push technology forward, which we now seem unable to do), in another we have one (sad, tragic) ace up our sleeve we didn’t have back then: our dominant reason has become so toxic, the kind of lives it pushes even its supposed winners to live is so sad (The pitiful and miserable (but rich!) meritocrats) that, as I’ve said a number of times, it pushes most of the people under its sway to reproduce less, or not to reproduce at all. And having less kids (a lot less than any previous generation in recorded history) happens to be a surefire way to reduce our environmental impact. So, in a kind of perverse fashion, the generation currently in their prime reproductive age is atoning for the sins of unbridled consumerism and utter inability to coordinate and translate into social action their vague desire to reduce their hydrocarbon footprint by leaving many less people behind to continue with the despoiling of the planet. Those additional tons of CO2 their bigger SUVs and bigger homes are pumping in the atmosphere are somehow compensated by them just having one baby (or no baby at all) instead of the 3-5 that their parents had.

Which doesn’t mean we have a lot of room for complacency. Voluntary demographic collapse (starting w Western societies, Korea and Japan, soon to be followed by China and the rest of Asia) is not happening “on time” to compensate for developing economies consuming ever increasing quantities of fossil fuels (and, let’s face it, advanced economies “saying” they will dramatically decarbonize, and feeling righteous and virtuous, but then doing nothing of the sort). Not on time, for sure, to avert catastrophic climate change. For all practical purposes it is better to think of climate change as already having happened. Yup, the rise of the sea level will play out during decades to come, but play out it will. Sorry, polar bears, you were magnificent beasts, we just utterly messed up with your habitat until there was none left to speak of. Hope you can make do in zoos and tiny reserves (with air conditioning in summer). AND, not all the world is voluntarily reducing their fertility.

Although it is very politically incorrect to point it out, certain continent is projected to go from about a billion inhabitants today to roughly three billion in the second half of the current century. Two billion additional human beings with legitimate aspirations to a life of dignity and (at least moderate) consumption. With approximately zero available land for cattle or agricultural production to feed them unless they use the little remaining rainforest they have, which would accelerate greatly both the concentration of greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere and the loss of biodiversity, a real double whammy! Nothing intractable, however, or nothing that would require any enlightened ruler to go on and force mass sterilizations on them (or any similar feat of autocratic social engineering, like the one accomplished by China’s derided one child policy, that their leaders are now discovering may have been quite unnecessary, as unbridled capitalism happens to be a much more efficient deterrent to total fertility than any central planner’s decree). Just give them enough free market and enough television and in less than a generation they will swiftly transition from 5-7 children per fertile woman to 1-2 (a feat already achieved in similar timeframes in such different places as rural Mexico and urban Iran).

So, although climate change will doubtlessly impoverish us, and exact an atrocious price on nature, accelerating the extinction of countless valuable species, I don’t think that’s what will do us in. Remember we annually throw away between 20 and 40% of the food we produce (estimates vary), so keeping us all fed with 20-40% less land is eminently feasible (and yes, I know not all land is equally productive… but we can quickly develop varieties of food crops adapted to different soils and -within reasonable boundaries- climates, and we have more than enough manure to enrich even the poorest soil just with our very own shit…). And there is wont to be less of us to feed in a few decades, even without any catastrophic war. What really worries me is that at some point, when technology stops progressing, it regresses. It has happened countless times before (although it doesn’t leave many traces in recorded history, that’s why the phenomenon is not widely known), and loss of key technologies may have an impact even more disruptive, more profound (and more detrimental to human flourishing) than climate change. A few examples of previous instances should suffice:

·         The Greeks knew how to build intricate gears, and apply them to predict the movement of the moon and stars, by 100 BC, as evidenced by the famous Antikhythera mechanism retrieved from a shipwreck of that era in 1901. Europeans wouldn’t regain the ability of creating machines with precise gears (clocks) until around 1500 AD, sixteen centuries later

·         The Chinese developed the ability to navigate the high seas and deploy enormous fleets under the Ming (commanded by the eunuch admiral Zeng He), fleets that would have put to shame and easily smashed the puny European ships the Iberians could tentatively send Eastwards in those days, in the early XV century. They would cancel them due to dynastic dissensions and not recover the ability to project power beyond their coast until our present times

·         The Europeans had a handwritten script in late roman times (uncial) that, after the collapse of the Roman empire, evolved towards forms (first Visigoth, and later Merovingian), apt to be reproduced quickly and smoothly in the newly available surfaces (parchment) in the 7^th and 8^th centuries. Under the directions of a new dynasty (founded by Charlemagne and centered in its capital of Aachen) it degenerated in a more homogeneous script (Carolingian), somewhat easier to read but much slower to write, as befits a society where illiteracy was widespread and only a tiny minority had any use at all for written language. Carolingian would be followed by an even more elaborate and laborious script, blackface (which is arguably even less legible than Carolingian), that would in turn make its way to printed texts and would stay in use in some countries (Germany) almost up to the XXth century (my own copy of the Prussian Academy edition of Kant’s complete works, the Akademie Textausgabe, is printed in blackface, so I know what I’m talking about when I mention its relative illegibility).It would take the continent almost eight hundred years to get back to a “technology” or a “know-how” for handwriting that would allow for “easy” learning and be accessible to the masses

Indeed, something similar is happening under our own very eyes. In our supposedly technologically very advanced times we have already forgotten the technology for sending human beings to the moon: remember how the media recently greeted with great fanfare the launch of SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy rocket? That was the 25 of June of this year (2019), and it was hailed as a significant milestone, as it was the most powerful rocket ever launched… by SpaceX. As it is approximately half as powerful as the Apollo X rocket that took Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michel Collins to our satellite… forty years ago (see? Another thing we could do in the 70s which we have not improved much since, if at all). Elon Musk is (as he doesn’t tire to repeat to every journalist wanting to spend 5’ with him) developing a much bigger rocket, sure (the famously called BFR) that would indeed improve over the Apollo, and would have the capability to launch a manned vessel to Mars… and that, I confidently assert, will never be fully developed or launched, as SpaceX will go bankrupt much sooner than that.

Want another example? In Europe and America we have lost the technology to build a Nuclear Power Plant, something we did routinely… in the 70s of last century (when else?). The ones “being built” in North America are a sad joke, with no activity whatsoever in the sites due to bankruptcies of the building companies, or the owners (utilities), or lack of permission from the regulator, or a combination of all three. The two (“third generation”) ones where ground has actually been broken in Europe (Olkiluoto in Finland and Flamanville in France) announce an additional year of delay every year (and a 20% increase in the projected costs), so they are not much closer to completion than they were a decade ago. For the rest (Hanhikivi, Hinkley Point C, Wylfa, Pax, Accuyu…) I doubt, given the political climate and the experience of the ones being built, they will ever be actually started, even lest completed. A whole field of technology slowly being lost and forgotten in front of our eyes.

And in the latter case, not one to be mourned and grieved by many, as most “ecologists” or “environmentalists” decided long ago it was an inherently evil technology, whose risks and drawbacks far outweighed its benefits, and humanity as a whole would be in a much better place if we had never learned how to split the atom. Maybe, maybe not. Unfortunately, designing and building nuclear power plants was a necessary school for keeping alive and improving a number of associated technologies (metallurgy, piping construction and erection, welding, precision mounting of complex equipment, high pressure pumps and valves manufacturing) that are now wilting, and jeopardizing our ability to build similarly advanced, or complex, pieces of equipment (like the vacuum vessel of ITER, mentioned above, that I fear will never be completed because of the sheer impossibility of finding enough welders, or building welding robots advanced enough, to ensure the required airtightness).

Note that in both cases I’ve mentioned (rockets to propel heavy loads into space and nuclear power plants) we have not necessarily lost the theoretical knowledge required to build them. There is no new physics to be rediscovered in order to achieve them, no technical problem to be solved to make ‘em work that hasn’t been already solved. What we have lost is the “institutional” framework that made them possible in a past time. From the money to invest in them (which, in the grand scheme of things, simply means we deem other things to be of higher priority, be them Taylor Swift LPs or Olympic Games, as money is just a signal of how much society as a whole values each good and service it produces) to the rules that bound them (safety measure, technical codes to calculate the thickness of the piping or the safety coefficients of the beams, etc.) and the people that find it worthy to design, build and operate them: we just not possess any more the organizational acumen to see those kind of projects through.

Be it as it may, I also do not think that humanity is doomed because we are losing (or have already lost) our collective ability to build nuclear power plants, or to build rockets that may take us some day beyond Earth’s atmosphere. We could make do without those things, as we indeed have done for most of our history (the ultimate environmentalist argument). I do think we will lead more impoverished lives, with less energy (and dirtiest, as the nuclear power plants not being built, or being shut down, are not being replaced by shiny, clean, renewable wind and solar plants, but by more fossil-fuel-powered ones: Why we are not reducing carbon emissions, Evolution of energy production by source but also number 8 on 10 things to do to reduce carbon emissions (sorry, not gonna happen)), less wealth, less enriching experiences, and less opportunities for human flourishing overall. And the accompanying consequences of those unsavory prospects are more unequal societies (as when there is less to distribute, and less growth, elites tend to compete between themselves more fiercely for the spoils, leaving less for the non-elite majority, as we see already happening in the starkest terms in the Anglo-Saxon countries), with less social mobility, less inter and intra-group harmony, less unity of purpose (in Toynbee’s term, declining societies where elites have lost the creative power to solve new challenges produce a disenfranchised, disenchanted proletariat that is ripe for a new universalistic faith as an alternative to the old, exhausted, civilizational values) and more strife, more anomy, more conflict and more despair.

Which takes me to the happy title of this post (at last!). It seems reasonable that the most complex, most challenging technological constructions are the first ones to stop working in decaying societies (in societies with no unity of purpose, which have by definition lost the ability to coordinate the efforts of many of its members to do things that require great sacrifice and great dedication). So it has been with nuclear energy and manned space exploration (I wonder how longer can unmanned space exploration keep going on once it becomes clear that after a certain point, nobody else is going up there, “boldly beyond” where anybody else has been… what would then be the point to keep on sending probes to what is mostly empty vacuum?), which both demanded a lot of difficult things to “go right”, to be set within very precise parameters, in order to be completed successfully. We can (and should!) wonder, then, what may be the next piece of technological wonder that we are in risk of losing. And I can think of three candidates: the internet, the power grid and the ability to cure infectious diseases. The third one, due to the increase in antibiotic-resistant bacteria, is the one I’m less familiar with, so I won’t deal with it here (and it’s scary enough without needing to delve further in it).

Regarding the second, I see it as the unavoidable consequence of our (somewhat pig-headed and irreflexive) drive towards an entirely distributed network, lacking what we call today “baseload plants”, based on non-programmable energy sources when storage technologies are not ready (and probably, given my current techno-pessimism, will never be) to ensure the right synchronization with the network of the heaviest consumers (think in blast furnaces not being able to work, except in island mode, providing for their own energy needs, as they would bring down they entire outside network every time they attempted to connect… not fun? You may not care much about blast furnace, but what if connecting the third EV of the block had the same effect?) Which doesn’t mean we would devolve in a Mad Max style of life, where switches and electric plugs stop working forever and the only energy source left is the little oil we can still put our hands on (ensuring a mad scramble to take possession of the last remaining spigots). Just a time of frequent and unpredictable blackouts, some of them lasting for days. Again, not enough to end human life, but to make civilizational continuity almost impossible. Between other things, because such discontinuous, unpredictable power supply would bring in its wake the demise of the IT based economy we are living under.

Which takes me to my first candidate for demise: the internet itself. Which I think will disappear even before the current continuous, reliable power grid (although it doesn’t need to: the operators of big data centers, like AWS, could build their own power plants, fully dedicated to feeding the needed Megawatts to their servers, with whatever dirty fuel they can put their hands on). And I think it is the next big chunk of technology (or the next big humanity achievement, if you prefer) to go for the following reasons:

·         Governments don’t want it: the idea of the citizenry having access to every type of information anytime, anywhere, with no filters is just too dangerous. In China they seem to have already achieved what five years ago in the West we thought impossible: full censorship over what almost a billion citizens see and discuss, in an almost frictionless way. It is just a matter of time since Europe, American (and the rest of Asian societies) replicate such feat, in a more decentralized manner, and subcontracting most of the censorship to private enterprises that will both make a mess out of it and use it to increase their leverage over the state remaining authority. Facebook and Twitter are well along the way of policing what is deemed acceptable discourse, and given the social pressure against “hate speech” (anything deemed deviant of the social consensus, which sounds very good until you take a more dispassionate view of what such consensus has achieved) that tendency will only accelerate

·         People don’t want it: I know, I know, this seems truly shocking, when you just have to go out in the street of any city (within a developed economy or otherwise) and everybody out there seems to be glued to their phone screens, fully immersed in a virtual world of social networks, web browsing, instant messaging, casual gaming and mail reading (that’s “the internet” in a nutshell). To which I usually answer: “follow the money”. The true measure of how much people value each good or service (even more so in this most materialistic of eras) is how much they are willing to pay for them. How much are those enthralled masses paying for their so absorbing net surfing? Zilch, a few tens of dollars a month for their mobile phone subscription. Much, much less than what costs to lay the wires, erect the towers, manufacture and configure the routers and put in place the satellites that move all the unimaginably vast amounts of zeros and ones that have to circulate to provide them with their experience. So far, almost all the big telcos that actually build the required infrastructure lose money with it, and investors keep on lending it to them in the expectation that somday, somehow, they will be able to monetize it (something that they thought a decade ago they could do by selling subscriptions to digital TV, a space that is becoming more crowded and more uncertain almost by the hour). Mobile telephony is an interesting case in point, as it has become one of the preferred modes of accessing the web. Companies have deployed now four “generations” of mobile networks, and in the end they have lost tons of money in every one of them (as they had to upgrade to the next before having fully recovered their initial investment), never being able to make the users pay in full. Now they are running to be the first to deploy the fifth one, and the specialized press is chock full of the usual (mostly baloney-ish) stories about what a gold mine it is going to be, and how it is going to fundamentally change the way people work and live. All while lining in gold the pockets of the telco companies, of course. Well, the manufacturers of the underlying equipment (one of which, Huawei, is going through a rough patch because of its kerfuffle with the Trump administration, which would merit a post of its own) are wont to make a killing, but the poor saps buying and using them will not, doesn’t matter how many new “killer apps”, and “new revenue streams” they are promised by astute consultants hungry to make a dime. In the end, investors will keep footing the bill of telephone users as long as there is no other, better, shinier opportunity for their hard-earned dollars, but woe the moment such opportunity arises (or, in a serious downturn, money dries up)…

Again, I don’t think any of it will happen suddenly, one day the governments of the world “closing the internet down”, or all the telcos going bust at the same time. I see a gradual degradation of service, with more and more sites being barred, or impossible to access, more and more discontinuities of service and less and less reliability. In that situation (similar to what you experience daily on rural villages in the north of Spain like where I’ve been for a week this summer), you just give up and learn to live again off the net, without feeling you are losing much, to be honest (I thought maybe I was from another generation, but my elder son seemed to also adapt just fine). I have to admit that it was a superbly engineered network (well, it was designed so the US high command could keep communications with their field stations was kept open in case of nuclear war, no matter how many nodes had been disabled, wasn’t it?) and that makes it extra resilient, but in the end the people will find it just too cumbersome, too full of holes and interruptions, and absurd rules about what can be discussed and why, and will resort to alternative ways of passing their time or find alternative modes of investing their attention, one that doesn’t require gazillions of wires and optic fiber and antennas and mega constellations and routers and multiplexors to be laid all over the Earth (hundreds of kilometers above in some cases) that nobody is really willing to pay for.

And when that happens… those will be interesting times indeed! 

What to believe (against relativism)

I’m well aware that an era of societal collapse and civilization’s decadence is not the best of times for strong assertions of belief and rigorous declarations of faith. Although it is difficult to disentangle what is a contributing cause and what is an unavoidable effect of the sorry state of modern society, the loss of legitimacy of our time’s dominant reason (for those new to this blog: aka desiderative reason, very bad!) contaminates any attempt to build a widely shared “grand narrative”, to articulate a set of guiding principles on how to live that a majority of people can give their assent to.

We are all jaded cynics nowadays, disenchanted empiricists, nihilistic spectators of the “death of God” and participants in the deconstruction mandated by post-modernism, well steeped in critical theory (the right, “alt-“ or vanilla, insists in calling it “cultural Marxism”, but we are not prone at this point to abet by that particular piece of tomfoolery), which means we are highly suspicious of any statement aspiring to be valid for “anybody” at “anytime”. Tools of oppression by the heteropatriarchy! We may cry on hearing them. Unsubtle attempts of the dominant groups to impose their value-system on the poor and the dispossessed. Indeed, the most cursory look at who formulated most of those tenets (we will look at them more closely in a moment) reveals the limited, unrepresentative nature of the group whose dominion they sought to validate: Western propertied white heterosexual men! (only Confucius and Lao Tzi were not Westerners, Diogenes of Sinope had no properties, Plato was not heterosexual, Augustine was -probably- not white and… well, you got me with the last one, to the best of my knowledge all the contributors to the canon I’m about to defend belonged to the male sex of the species, as Jack Lemmon famously said caught in a similar pickle, “nobody is perfect!”).

Which means that, given what we know of how History with a capital H has turned out (World Wars! Genocides of all classes, sizes and stripes, from the Armenians to the Jews to the Tutsis almost in our very own day! Environmental degradation! Totalitarian regimes mass murdering their own subjects! Global warming abetted by giant corporations and governments! Mass famines! Crushing poverty!) we can’t just look at the camera with a straight face and proclaim that there is a solid body of things we humans have learned that may differ a little itsy bitsy bit in the borders, but basically agree (meaning any reasonable person would be OK with something around 80-90% of it) on the fundamentals about how we should live, what we know and can know of “what there really is” (of what constitutes the world), and how we should treat each other.

Or can we?

Of course we can. Not only we can: we must. Because if we shirk our responsibility to state what we believe,  to announce what constitutes the foundation of our value system, so other people can know it, eventually discuss it, and be affected by it (be it for embracing part of it, for rejecting it wholesale or for refining it at the borders, in that comparatively minor areas where there can be some well-intentioned difference between reasonable people) we are implicitly accepting the sorry state of affairs I mentioned in my introduction to this post. Recognizing that such value system is just one between many, equally valid, or rather, equally invalid, equally unfounded, equally random and haphazard, an unjustifiable accretion of ideas that we got to have by circumstances we have no control over, like our birth, our environment, or the peculiar position of the stars in the moment of us forming them. Recognizing, thus, that embracing such values, living in accordance to them, is but an aesthetic option, not that different from choosing one outfit rather than another to go to a certain party, and not more amenable to rational justification or to reasoned defense of the choice (as such justification and defense can never go much further than “I just happen to like this particular combination of clothes” or “I just happen to find this set of colors, shapes and textures more pleasing than any other alternative”).

Which, on first sight, doesn’t seem such a bad thing. Very befitting of our super-individualistic (in Durkheimian words, super-anomic) social arrangement. You do your thing as long as nobody is harmed by it, and I do mine. Respect all options, live and let live and all that. Until you look around and start realizing the harm done by such individualism and relativism. Just a quick recap:

·         Inability to reach agreements that require sacrifices of a part of the population (even if it’s the part that is enormously better off), and forces us in suboptimal collective states as long as there is not some “Pareto-efficient” way out of them (i.e. one where nobody has to sacrifice anything for the common good, unfortunately we run out of such ways 40 years ago). Examples of such states are economies with ever-increasing degrees of inequality in the advanced West (to the point of the top 10% hoarding all the fruits of productivity increases to the exclusion of a growing percentage of impoverished left-behinds); impossibility to wean ourselves off fossil fuels (see the “yellow vests” revolts in France, or the growing emissions of greenhouse gasses in Germany: everybody is super-environmentally friendly until they have to pay more for their gas, or have to keep their nuclear power plants running); apparently insurmountable difficulties to address the growing demographic imbalances around Europe (African Sub-Saharan population ballooning and European one collapsing) and to accommodate the now incompatible demands of a group that wants to escape abject poverty and ecological collapse with those of another that wants to maintain their current racial and cultural homogeneity…

·         Not only are we failing as a collective to steer ourselves in the direction more conductive to our flourishing (which, again, would require us to distribute what we jointly produce more fairly, to take better care of our shared environment and to accommodate each other less confrontationally), we are note even able to conduct our own lives, not having “strong enough” motives for choosing one way of comporting ourselves rather than other, and thus choosing once and again the path of least resistance (those activities that give us more pleasure, without requiring too much sacrifice or effort from us). Unfortunately, choosing the easy path over the hard one once and again ends up painting ourselves in a corner, or boxing us inside a suboptimal version of ourselves. After you have exhausted the enjoyments and pleasures the material world has to offer (and your mileage may vary, but you reach that limit much sooner than you expect when you are young and feel both immortal and invincible) all there is left is to let yourself go entirely and die in a more or less self-destructive way (depending on how attached you have remained to other people whose feelings you may be loath to hurt). Need proof? Check the decrease in life expectancy in one of the most materially wealthier (and spiritually poorer) societies in the world today (you know who I’m talking about).

So only the very, very short-sighted may nonchalantly agree with the rosy diagnostic that everything is fine and dandy in our blissfully value-less societies. Things, really, are rotten and going to hell. Yup, China has lifted 800 million people from the abjectest poverty (yipeee! Good for them!) and that masks a lot of worldwide statistics, but once they finish playing catch-up (same applies for India, Latin America, SW Asia… only Africa so far remains a hopeless basket case which I cannot fathom how it may evolve) they will join us in our accelerating collapse, which translates into a steeper decline for the average person in disposable income, wealth, health, life expectancy and security (so the nations that have just barely joined the global middle class will feel as if the party they worked so hard and so long to join is abruptly winding down immediately after their arrival, just imagine the sort of angry populism that feeling may spawn!) . Which, again, is only meant to strengthen my contention that we need values, we need to proclaim them, we need to publicize them, we need to submit them to careful scrutiny, and we need to proselytize about them, trying to convince other people to adopt them and to live by them.

That proclamation, publicization, scrutinization and proselytizing is what I try to do in my ethics classes (but, alas! Preaching ethics to business school students many times feels like extolling the virtue of chastity in front of testosterone-laden 18 YO male athletes… they sometimes seem to get a fraction of it, but I’m afraid the mix of the environment and the strength of their own impulses end up overpowering most of them), plus, more through example than discourse, in my job and in every interaction with family and friends. Although describing those values in more detail (so the claim that the vast majority of what they consist in is shared by every well-intentioned, rational person, can be validated) may be a worthy use of this blog’s space, this is not what I will attempt in the remainder of this post, as I’ve many times found that previous to the exposition of any coherent system of values, some foundations have to be laid down. The necessary foundations (the precondition that have to be fulfilled before a certain value can be recognized and agreed upon by multiple individuals) that are required are some very basic constituents of the reality we inhabit. If we cannot first agree on the nature of what is really and factually “out there”, there is little chance we may agree on what we have sufficient reasons for doing (or for refraining to do). So bear with me for a moment whilst we review those basic constituents:

·         The universe is, without a hint of a doubt, “designed”. Let’s take the most famous metaphor to explain how we can so confidently assert such surprising fact (taken directly from William Paley’s Natural Theology): if we found a watch lying by the road we immediately apprehend that it is very different from the “productions” of the natural world, like a stone or a tree. Its parts (wheels, springs, hands) are intricately connected to each other and, even if we know nothing of its purpose and use (if, that is, we know nothing of time measurement), we can see that a minimal deviation of each of those parts (the misalignment of a wheel or the fracture of a spring, say) would cause the whole to stop functioning entirely. Similarly, it is a well-known fact that the most minute deviation from their currently observed values of each one of the fundamental constants of nature (those that determine the strength and evolution of the forces of nature -gravitational constant, electric charge, weak and strong nuclear force, average life of the different baryons, spin, etc.) would cause a universe not only radically different from our own, but one where complex conscious life could not evolve (the concatenation of conditions to have a first generation of stars explode creating the necessary concentration of heavy elements like carbon, oxygen, iron, calcium, etc. to gravitate around a second generation of stars to create planets at the right distance of them for amino acids -or any similarly complex molecules, amenable to an almost infinite number of recombinations from a basic repeatable pattern would simple not be possible, given any of those minutest of changes in the basic structure of how nature works). That’s the “fine tuning” argument for the universe being designed, and hard as I’ve tried, I haven’t been able to find a cogent argument against it.

Too bad in its original form it has been essentially discarded, as good ol’ Bill Paley applied it to the biological form of humans (thus for him, it was not the whole universe, but just the human body, which had been obviously designed by the superior intelligence of a designer), and his book happened to be printed just a few years before On the Origin of Species, by a certain Charles Darwin, which proposed an alternative explanation for how the apparently intentionally directed wondrous adaptation of man (or any other species of animal or plant, for what it’s worth) could be so admirably suited to its environment. That explanation was, of course, the theory of natural evolution through the survival of the fittest (or the most attractive to the opposite sex, in sexually reproducing species), which materialist philosophers extol mainly because it allows them to discard the need of an “intelligent designer” that a designed organism would otherwise call for. So the whole “argument from design” got a really bad rap, and has since then been seen with suspicion (if so inclined you can read the whole The Blind Watchmaker by the somewhat repetitious Richard Dawkins as a relentless and quite joyless exploration of such line of argument, although I would advise against it).

But of course, what applies to individual organism (or to whole species) and brilliantly explains their adaptation to an individual, concrete environment, is far from being applicable tout court to the whole of what there is. Not that some astute cosmologists have not tried, and indeed an “evolutionary theory of the cosmos” has been postulated, in which whole universes are being born (in the singularity conditions within black holes, maybe) in quick succession, with quantum fluctuation allowing for slight variations in the values of the fundamental constants. Some of those universes die almost instantly, others prosper for a little longer although they are uniformly dull and uninteresting, and others, finally are stable and varied enough for complex biological entities to evolve within them (and then, of course, it stops being surprising that we find ourselves in of those blessed by the right set of conditions for us to appear in it).

However, you cannot apply the same epistemic weight (call it "measure of epistemic success") to the theory of natural evolution and to the theory of multiple universes (necessarily of mind boggling number and variation). For the first one we have countless proofs and traces and confirmations (and we can even see it happening in real time in the evolution of short lived organisms, from lab mice to bacteria). For the second one we have nothing, and it is doubtful we could ever have something as tenuous as a vague indication, let alone conclusive proof. If there are all those universes with different constants, they are beyond our event horizon, there is no way we can reach them or have “real” information about their existence (involving the exchange of some force or matter).

But frankly, every time I tell someone “on the strength of the evidence, the most parsimonious, more efficient, more plausible working hypothesis is that the universe has been designed” I see their resistence coming from something that goes like “ooooh, I see you coming from a thousand miles! A designed universe requires a designer! The designer has to be a big guy with a long beard that condones the burning of heretics and the subordination of women! And I don’t want such a big guy to exist! I just don’t want there is a God! Hence, the universe cannot be designed! Hence almost infinite universes of whom there is nay a trace!”. I grant that from the first premise (designed universe) the second necessarily follows (there is a designer). But all the rest is not just unwarranted, but just a lot of baloney. Furthermore, you should realize that what you want or do not want there to be is of no importance for what there really is. We will get in a moment to what the acceptance of the design of reality entails (not a big bearded guy, for sure), I’ll just reiterate that for anybody with a basic understanding of language (that is, for anybody who understand what “being designed” means, and yes, that meaning surely also includes somebody with intention doing the design) there simply is no (honest) discussion that the universe is, as a matter of fact, designed. By something. Let’s call that something (the one that has done the design) “a mind”, and let’s concede that such mind has to be external to the universe itself.  

·         There are conscious beings in the universe, starting with us, humans, which exhibit that consciousness to a highest degree, but following with a plethora of other living things, some of which seem to be also conscious (we don’t need to concern ourselves now with just how similar or how different those other types of consciousness can be from our own). That is, there are “minds” within the universe. If we want to be fully rigorous, we can only have absolute certainty of one mind (namely, ours), and the extent to which we can be sure of the existence of other minds is a pretty thorny issue that has exercised (unsuccessfully) intelligences more brilliant than mine. For the purposes of this post I’ll let it be at the point where I ask my patient readers to take it on faith that there are indeed other minds mostly like his own, which, as a minimal introspection will show, are capable of forming intentions, having desires, notice impressions, recall past events, harbor feelings, formulate sentences, invent stories, imagine alternative states of affairs, consider hypothetical consequences of actions and whatnot.

So far, and regardless of what some neuroscientists enamored of not-too-subtle splotches of color purporting to represent how our brain works (aka fMRI, EEGs and the like) would like you to believe, the interaction between those minds and the material reality to which they are tethered is pretty mysterious. We know that minds require a very, very complex biological structure, called brains, and made by a grey gooey weighing around five pounds and sitting inside our skull, to be self-conscious. If the brain is damaged, or dissolves after death, as far as we know the brain stops being able to manifest itself. Not being able to measure its influence in the material world any more (regardless of legend, lore, and a sometimes flourishing psychic industry), we assume it is no more, although a massive number of traditions maintain it just goes to some other place. If we are honest with ourselves, we have no credible evidence whatsoever of such persistence, and for all practical purposes (regarding this material universe we are familiar with) the disappearance of the brain is necessarily and inexorably accompanied by the disappearance of the mind it supported (or, as naturalist would prefer to say, unwittingly drawing on a scholastic term, of the mind it “embodied”).

·         We, humans, can understand the “deep” structure of the world (identify the astounding regularities we call “laws of nature”, and which enable us to predict how things will be in the future in an amazing number of realms, with an amazing degree of precision). To put it another way, our “minds” cannot just identify patterns, and then patterns within those patterns in a seemingly unbounded recursivity, but can quantify those patterns, abstract them from the precise conditions we have so far observed and generalize them to other equivalent ones (to other places, or other times, be they in the future or in the past). And, in what may well be the most surprising aspect of this ability of ours, we have devised a whole method to test those regularities, recreating the precise combination of observed conditions and intended variation to ascertain if the model of how reality works does indeed correspond reliably with reality itself.

There is some legitimate discussion about how much of the structure of reality we really understand, and about the possibility of some day understanding all of it, and how such understanding would look like (what a “Grand Unified Theory” would be), but what few people deny is that we are indeed making progress, every passing century allows us to model and predict and tinker with new areas, in a sense confirming that the understanding we have gained so far is for real, is the reflection of a deeper alignment between our knowledge (a mental aspect) and what is “really out there”. I mention this because in the “social sciences” (an oxymoron, as I’m about to explain) since the beginning of the last century there has been this notion about the supposedly shaky status of the “natural sciences” (or even “hard sciences”), which has taken a number of forms (scientific paradigm theory, social constructivism, epistemic skepticism, Edimburgh School strong program) and basically maintains that the apparent success of physics, chemistry (a branch of physics), engineering and the like is just a mirage, born out of the power that technicians exert over how natural science is taught. So the progress of the sciences is not a reflection of our minds somehow getting closer to “truth” (a very tricky concept), or of us refining our understanding of how “the external world” really works (as there is no external world, or if there is, as Kant would have it, there is no way for us to know anything about it). It is just a matter of wily teachers duping their gullible pupils in some methodologies that conscientiously erase every alternative approach that came before, and brainwashes them in appreciating only the “newest” way of doing things. “Newest”, of course, is uncritically equated with “better”, or “truer”, but in reality it is not, everything is a social construct, hiding power relationships (thus the professor is more powerful than the pupil, the physicists are more powerful than the literary critic, and all of them are more powerful than the secretary that, through the practice of transcendental meditation, understands the true nature of reality better than any of them).

May be. May be, as Richard Rorty put it, geology is not really a science about rocks and mountains because there are no such things as “rocks and mountains” (there are only mental representations, and words that try to describe them whilst being very imperfect means of conveying meaning from one mind to the next). I can’t be sure of certain things like what would Rick Rorty think of this post (and of the kind of things that social sciences deal with in general). But I’m pretty sure of what the temperature of a nuclear power plant core will be a certain amount of time after scramming if the primary pumps do not keep recirculating the coolant. I’m pretty sure of the amount of weight a bridge can support before collapsing, or the amount of radiation at a certain point of the spent fuel pool given the level of burning such fuel has sustained. Even for non-deterministic events I can calculate with astounding precision the probability of finding certain electron (with a very finely measured energy level) in certain region of the space. And I know when a new theory to explain the behavior of the core of the NPP, of the bridge and of the electron is “better” or “truer” (when it gives me more precise predictions, applicable to a wider range of cases). So I’ll leave the discussion of the “real” existence of the core, the bridge and the electron to people trained in disciplines that obviously have not prepared them to distinguish in a similar way between good and bad theories, between those that describe nature more truly or less truly (maybe the objects their theories deal with are not amenable to such clear cut distinctions, I won't go into that here). I’ll just tell my readers bluntly that, in the realm of inanimate matter (that not involving minds, isn’t that curious?) we can confidently assert with Hegel that “all the real is rational, and all the rational is real”. We can assert, with an extraordinary level of certainty, that there is a material world independent from us and, what is more surprising, that our minds can, to a (so far) ever increasing degree understand that material world, construct inside them “mental models” that reflect such reality with ever increasing accuracy and elegance and perspicuity.

So, to recap, there are three extremely important things that, before forming our beliefs, we should consider, namely:

1.       The universe has been designed by a mind outside it

2.       There are other minds (other, that is, than our own) inside it

3.       Those minds can understand how the universe works (which can alternatively be stated as: "there is a homothecy between the mind that designed the universe and the minds that inhabit it")

Given how long it has taken me to argue for those three simple truths, I’ll leave the consequences we should extract from them (and maybe some further strengthening of the argument by considering the most common objections) to my next post. 

The center cannot hold (the nuts and bolts of how “this” goes to hell)

These last weeks have given us more examples of the demise of traditional parties, and the rise of groups that the MSM likes to portray as “extremists” or, until recently, “fringe”:

·         The Brazilian presidential election has been won by Jair Bolsonaro, widely depicted as the local version of Donald Trump because of his incendiary declarations condemning homosexuals and darkly warning of the dangers of a “communist threat” that, after almost 14 years of PT (workers’ party) government, probably existed only in his fevered head

·         Two consecutive regional elections in Germany (in Bavaria and in Hesse) have seen the collapse to its lowest levels since WWII of the traditional center-right (the Christian-Democrat CDU and its Bavarian variant, the CSU) and center-left (the social democrats of the SPD), and the concomitant rise of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) and the Greens (considered not long ago to be far-left, but in these confused times who knows how they are classified any more)

Those electoral tidings that resonate with a number of similar ones (the election of Donald Trump in the USA, the victory of Brexit in the UK, the formation of a government dominated by the Lega Norte in Italy, the ascent of Marine Le Pen’s National Front in France, the consolidation in power of the authoritarian forces coalescing around Erdogan in Turkey, Orban in Hungary and Kaczinsky in Poland, etc.) which I already analyzed in a previous post The allure of populism .

In this post, I want to provide a further explanation of why those forces are in the ascendant, why we can expect to see many more of them winning elections, governing and consolidating their hold on power, and why, far from preventing the collapse I mentioned in my last post (Decline and fall, indeed ) they are the surest sign of its inevitability. We won’t avoid “this” collapsing by electing extremists and letting them try (foreordained to fail) alternatives to the current social compact, we will rather ensure that “this” goes to hell in a swifter, speedier fashion, as those “alternatives” promising easy fixes to complex problems, once given the chance to actually spread their fairy dust over the electoral body, will miserably fail and only hasten the demise of “this”.

“This”, of course, being our current socioeconomic system, and its dominant reason (the ideological underpinning that both justifies it and keeps it humming along by indoctrinating every member of society to play by certain rules that, although noxious for each individual, happen to be great to smother any alternative that may be presented). To understand why the failure of the “extremist” or “populist” alternatives is unavoidable, let’s quickly summarize the problems that affect every single one of today’s societies, stated as succinctly and pithily as possible (so do not expect any of my usual rhetorical flourishes in the following enumeration):

1.       Demographic collapse of advanced (and middle-income) economies, with number of births in all of Europe, America (North and South), Oceania and North of Africa and Asia below replacement levels (not yet in India, but getting there surefootedly), and increasing life expectation causing a ballooning of unfunded liabilities in the most advanced economies in the form of medical costs and social security for retirees that the new generations will be unable to provide

2.       Demographic explosion of Sub-Saharan Africa, that increasingly depends on the rest of the world to feed a population that keeps growing (as the increasing amount of international help barely compensates the increase in mouths to feed, they stay at about the same level of poverty, that in turn keeps the incentives for having as many babies as possible in place… for a notably delirious and pigheaded analysis of the problem see Douthat: all of Europe's problems would disappear if womin went back to having seven babies each )

3.       Increasing intra-country inequality, somewhat compensated by a shrinking inter-country one. But at some point, Chinese peasants will be more riled up by the differing fortunes between themselves and rich city-dwellers than by the joy of seeing the diminishing differences between them and rust belt Americans. And who knows? May be rust belt Americans will stop being assuaged by the fact the blacks and Latinos still have it worse than themselves, and will in turn be riled up by the fact that all the improvements in wealth production of the last fifty years have been vacuumed up by the richest 1% between them

4.       Environmental degradation, caused by the increasing pressure of a growing/ much grown population on a finite planet. Such degradation takes the form of shrinking wild habitats, loss of biodiversity and, the one with the biggest potential for worsening our quality of life, anthropogenic climate change

5.       Technological stagnation or, rather, technological development of the “wrong” technologies: we do not invent much that help us produce more material goods with less effort (thus, we are getting significantly worse at generating energy, extracting less and less Megawatts from each megawatt devoted to the production of the required infrastructure, ditto for transportation, agriculture, residential building and space exploration), but such lack of inventiveness and technological development is clouded (and people are kept ignorant about it) by the stupendous development of technologies to capture our attention and entertain us (aka dupe us, fool us, lie to us, deceive us, delude us, distract us and whatnot)

Those are serious problems. Because of them, the generation that today have between 0 and 15 years in the advanced economies will have the dubious honor of being the first, since the collapse of the Roman Empire of the West, to enjoy a life materially worse than their parents’ (the Chinese and Indians and Latin Americans may get a bit more mileage from playing catch up, in their case may be its two generations down the line that will have that same distinction). They will have ubiquitous Internet access and will enjoy almost for free any entertainment we can dream of, but Alas! That entertainment will be dismal, crappy and despondent. How do I know? Because dying, decadent societies are unable to create great art. Creating durable, inspiring, arresting art requires believing there are things that really matter, identifying oneself with great narratives bigger than us, being able to sacrifice one’s own comfort for the good of others or for the sake of self-expression, or believing in sources of meaning outside of the material world. And almost nobody in the West or in the East, in the Northern hemisphere or in the Southern one, truly believes in that any more. They can only be cynical, post-modern, self-referential, jaded, detached. More Banksy than Michel Angelo. More Jay Z than Beethoven. So yep, they will populate the noosphere (or the memeplex, or whatever idiotic name the clever studious of the virtual reality want to concoct) with catchy images and catchy tunes and catchy, snazzy ideas (expressed in less than 140 characters, who has time for more than that?) that will go viral in ever shortening times, and be consumed by ever increasing amounts of rapt audiences, only to be forgotten as fast, in the perpetual pursuit of the latest fad and the latest trend, all equally perishable and equally fast forgotten. What’s more, that deluge of empty entertainment will not make us a iota happier, will not make our life a iota worthier, and will not, thus, make us want to propagate it a iota more than now (which is not much, see problem #1).

But before we get there (the nuts and bolts I mentioned in the title, more about them in a moment), let us review what answers the “traditional” (i.e. non-populist) parties, the representatives of the majority of the people (according to the establishment) are offering to those serious, seemingly intractable problems:

·         From the right, we hear that

o   1. Is no problem at all: less people? More riches to enjoy between the remaining ones! And if we really want more people (i.e. if we took the demographic suicide of advanced and not-so-advanced economies seriously) all we would need to do was ban abortions and limit access to contraceptives! (never mind European societies have been successfully controlling their reproduction rates since the XVIII century, when abortion was as effectively banned as the most traditional conservative could dream of and no contraceptives existed)

o   2. Is a convenient excuse for more socially regressive policies: those dark guys pouring over our frontiers are the source of all our social problems, give more weapons to the police to keep them out and send back those who seep inside!

o   3. Is a blessing: inequality spurs innovation and incentivizes the right behavior by rewarding the industrious entrepreneurs that create wealth for all and punishing the lazy, undeserving poor

o   4. Is a temporary blip: if we keep on incentivizing those same industrious entrepreneurs they will come up with technology-based solutions to those problems (clean energy technologies! Carbon capture to reverse climate change! Cloning to retrieve extinguished species! Age-reversing medicine to make us immortal!)

o   5. Is not happening at all: thanks to Moore law, technological change has not only not stagnated, but is still accelerating. What if TFP is not increasing as it used to? It is surely a measurement error, and we are one expansive cycle away from reaching a post-scarcity society where we will be able to tie dogs with sausages!

·         Whilst from the traditional left we receive the following messages regarding the challenges we face:

o   1. Is no problem at all: less people? Less pressure on the sacred Earth! We humans are a cancer on the planet, anyways, so the less of us there is the better!

o   2. Is a convenient excuse for more redistribution: those unlucky individuals are not responsible for being born in the wrong place (true), so they have as good a claim as us to the collective benefits our society bestows on its undeserving members (false, if their enjoyment of such benefits would make said benefits disappear both for them and for us, as is sadly the case), thus we have to welcome as many of them as possible, in order to force the rich to give more of their illegitimately accrued wealth to the rest

o   3. Is a temporary blip that can be corrected with a bit more of social engineering and state intervention (although it is unclear how that intervention is supposed to work, after in the 90’s and aughts social democrat parties in Europe essentially subscribed to the neoliberal creed and lowered taxes, deregulated protected industries and committed to balanced budgets regardless of business cycle): the modern left agrees with the modern right that the first imperative is to grow the economy with low inflation, and only after that has been achieved may some (very minor) redistribution be considered. If there is no growth, no redistribution will be abetted (see Greece for the last ten years)

o   4. Is not happening at all: the only environment to be concerned about is the social environment. There is no such thing as nature, only what we create with our labor (and labor relations can only take the form of class conflict, because we all belong to a class, namely exploiters or exploited, rapacious capitalists or progress-bearing proletarians), so animal species disappearing or the planet warming is of no consequence, other than by its potential influence on what class finishes on top in the centuries long struggle

o   5. Is a blessing: that so-called technological advance was a source of disruption and stress for the weakest members of society (the blue-collar workers that constitute the majority of the membership of leftist parties), so the less there is of it the better. Lowbrow culture available to all is great, as all that snotty highbrow was a conspiracy of the elites to identify their own members and collectively disregard the good, honest entertainment of the subjugated masses

So traditional parties may switch some message here and wiggle some answer there, but what both the left and the right have in common is a complete lack of solutions to our society’s most pressing problems. Instead of solutions, they offer the following (what, for lack of a better term, we may call distractions, or more directly, canards):

·         The great lie of the right is that we are not yet rich enough, our economy is simply not producing enough goods, so the first imperative is to make it grow even faster. Some good things (more individual freedom of choice) and some very bad ones (less solidarity and a more frayed safety network in the form of less guaranteed, mandatory health and unemployment insurance) are presented as the necessary price that it is reasonable to pay in order to achieve that accelerated growth. Look, I get that growth in the West has been, until now, a very considerable net gain for almost everybody. I see that there is an airtight, super-strong case for growing the economies of Botswana, India, Bangladesh and Vietnam (among many other) before considering how that growth is distributed. But Germany? Sweden? The good ol’ US of A? If they had to choose between producing more goods and enjoying more leisure time, or producing more goods and ensuring everybody has health insurance and nobody goes bankrupt because of an unexpected serious illness… I know very well what morality would unabashedly demand: bring on the vacations and the socialized medicine! Even if they require higher marginal taxes for individuals and/or corporations, which in turn cause a bit less growth (a causal relationship that is in no way as firmly established as its proponents would like you to believe). The case for the opposite is looking more and more morally suspect, as the Republican party of the USA makes more apparent every passing day.

·         The great lie of the Left is that we all belong to some oppressed minority, and that only through collective action can we redress such oppression and improve our sad lot. Women? Victims of the hideous patriarchy that single-handedly explains why there aren’t as many female CEOs as male ones, plus of the almost universal prevalence of rape and sexual harassment, to which 99% of them are daily subjected. Homosexuals? Victims of permanent and widespread homophobia that marginalizes them and silences them and physically harms them through countless hate crimes. Immigrants? Heroic, hard-working saints in pursuit of a better life, animated only by their desire to improve their descendants’ lot in life and unfailingly respectful of their host countries traditions and norms. Racial minorities? If they are not all millionaires it is because society is rife with racism and discrimination, they are given no opportunities at all, the system is uniformly rigged against them and the police and the judicature conspire to keep them down, massively (and unjustly) incarcerates them, when not downright guns them down. Transgender people? As homosexuals but on steroids regarding how brutalized and attacked they have been (so deserving an extra dose of sympathy and support, that in the USA apparently starts and ends with signaling the bathrooms they can use).

Those elements, so prominent in the public discourse of the traditional parties, are finding less and less enthusiasm, and are less and less able to mobilize their dwindling bases because they appeal to non-existing problems (or to problems that few people, outside of the think tanks and university campuses from which those parties recruit their cadres, consider relevant). In the meantime, the real problems, the five problems I enumerated, are either ignored or given false solutions, condemned to fail. And as long as they are not solved, which would probably require the reformulation of the dominant reason that organizes social life (something that I’m afraid no single human being, doesn’t matter how enlightened or persuasive or convincing, can accomplish), they will keep getting worse. And all of us will be worse off because of them, trundling along in a society that is more inimical to human flourishing, where we spend more time in school/vocational training/ university (online or otherwise) but we learn less and less, where we eat worse quality food, we live in lower quality buildings, we breathe lower quality air, we wear lower quality clothes, we go from one uninspiring place to the next more slowly, in a less efficient vehicle (doesn’t matter if it has an internal combustion engine, like current cars or planes, or an electric one, like many current trains, which only displaces where the pollution is generated). But boy, will we be entertained in the way! By ubiquitous screens, absorbing our attention every single second with a steady flow of trash that will make current reality TV look like Socrates discourses during the Athenian enlightenment in comparison.

Maybe we will still vote, maybe we will give up on democracy altogether, because we finally realize all options on offer are but aspects of the ruthless defense of the same hapless plutocracy, intent on corralling every last atom of material wealth produced and siphoning it towards the lucky few that consume the same crap (ideological or otherwise) than everybody else, only in greater abundance and with one small twist: they will delude themselves believing they somehow deserve their superior riches, their differential access to those material goods everybody is so unhappily producing, whilst paying them a pittance, the bare minimum to keep them alive and servile enough to tend to their every whim in exchange for the scraps of their continuous feasting. They will try to convince everybody else of that same mantra, of course (that is, they will keep on selling the ideological justification of such inequality: the meritocracy myth and all that), and for some time they will succeed (see the current state of the USA and UK politics if you need an illustration of how such a society may look like) but I have a strong hunch that at some point they will stop pretending, and just cancel the whole charade and keep the masses subjugated through (stale) bread and (high-def, VR enhanced) circus, without giving them a say on how they are governed (too complex and technical, you know, to leave a bunch of rubes decide on such substantial issues).

Until that final state (universal dictatorship supporting appalling levels of inequality) is reached, the three key aspects to pay attention to in how the decline of the current social order plays out are:

-          Corruption as the symptom of the disaffection between elites and the rest (that thus becomes a proletariat in the Toynbeean sense), and as the common theme of dissatisfaction with established parties and experts from all disciplines. Perceived corruption of all the political choices on offer will be (as it has usually been in the past) the final argument for the abolition of democracy and popular participation in the decision of how society is governed and what laws are enacted. Expect, thus, higher and higher levels of corruption at all levels, ceaselessly denounced by the free press (while there is such a thing, being a useful tool of justification of the rule of the few) until nobody cares any more about it and it is widely accepted as just the usual way of doing business.

-          Lack of legitimacy of all the institutions (political parties, unions, established churches that align themselves with the temporal power, even civic institutions, that end up also aligned with one tribe or other), derived from the fact that they are (correctly) seen as answering to non-existing problems while ignoring the real ones. Again, what today would be perceived as an illegitimate form of government (a military dictatorship, say) may not be so once every other option has been similarly discredited. Expect the army to be one of the last institutions to be discredited, and thus at some point to be the one the oligarchy (that’s me and my pals, in case you have forgotten) turns to in order to buttress a collapsing social order.

-          Remember, finally, how according to Toynbee in the collapsing phase of every civilizational unit the proletariat always finds a common narrative, alternative (and typically despised by) to the one embraced by the elites, to give meaning and make sense of their condition. A new universal religion still has to take shape and inspire the proletariat to overthrow the current elite that is hoarding all the economic growth (the future that has indeed arrived, but unequally), and at this point I for one has no clue about what shape that universal religion may take. It may be (my preferred option) a revival of the existing one, cleansed of its most unsavory elements. It may be something entirely new we still have not heard of. Be it as it may, we will contemplate it with dismay, we will despise it and accuse its followers of irrationality and fanaticism and bigotry and idiocy. But they will teach it to future generations, while the values we cherish will be seen as corrupted and false. 

In summary: expect the five big problems to get worse, democracy to wither away, corruption to balloon (even from its currently stratospheric level, to be soon dwarfed by what is to come) and finally, some obscure sect propounding barely intelligible nonsense to catch the imagination of the masses and finally to overturn our current order. Whatever comes next, I have no clue, and I can only pray it is not worse than what we have now in front of us (or than the last five thousand years, which have been dismal enough).