a way forward
An outstanding contribution to my Invitation and Repair project (see the tag at the bottom of this post) from Samuel Arbseman: “The Way-Forward Machine”:
Some have begun to look for inspiration at long-lived institutions, from religious establishments to multigenerational businesses — for example, Kongō Gumi is a Japanese construction company still operating after over 1,400 years and the Ise Jingu Shrine is about 2,000 years old. But there is one conspicuously overlooked group, one “community of practice” that has persisted, with surprising consistency, over millennia: the Jews. If what we’re really interested in is how to plan for millennia hence, why not ask how Judaism has managed to persist in a coherent way, benefiting humanity for millennia? By combining a deep reverence for history and text — one that can be drawn upon in times of catastrophe and rapid change — with the understanding that each generation needn’t be content with just revering the past, Jews have created a distinctive mechanism for creating while also maintaining.
And:
When we think about building something for the long term, most long-term thinking involves a burst of creation at the beginning, followed by maintenance, whether it’s for large-scale construction projects or long-lived institutions. While caretaking is far from a bad thing, future generations can be locked into the vision of those who have come before them, and are denied a certain amount of agency. And if the choice is simply maintainer or creator, too many of us are going to choose to build the new, rather than preserve the old. That’s simply what our modern age prizes: novelty. There have been attempts to rekindle the excitement at maintenance, such as with the group The Maintainers, a research community focused on the repair and maintenance of infrastructure. It’s a sympathy I share. But, by and large, people would far prefer to create the new than be a caretaker to the old. However, Judaism recognizes that this is a false dichotomy; it provides for a certain amount of innovation for each generation, a balance of the creative and the caretaker.
Fantastic stuff — much to be reflected on here … assuming that I eventually return to blogging.
unbribed
The Magnificent Bribe — Real Life:
Nearly 50 years ago, long before smartphones and social media, the social critic Lewis Mumford put a name to the way that complex technological systems offer a share in their benefits in exchange for compliance. He called it a “bribe.” With this label, Mumford sought to acknowledge the genuine plentitude that technological systems make available to many people, while emphasizing that this is not an offer of a gift but of a deal. Surrender to the power of complex technological systems — allow them to oversee, track, quantify, guide, manipulate, grade, nudge, and surveil you — and the system will offer you back an appealing share in its spoils. What is good for the growth of the technological system is presented as also being good for the individual, and as proof of this, here is something new and shiny. Sure, that shiny new thing is keeping tabs on you (and feeding all of that information back to the larger technological system), but it also lets you do things you genuinely could not do before. For a bribe to be accepted it needs to promise something truly enticing, and Mumford, in his essay “Authoritarian and Democratic Technics,” acknowledged that “the bargain we are being asked to ratify takes the form of a magnificent bribe.” The danger, however, was that “once one opts for the system no further choice remains.”
This is a useful survey of Mumford’s work, and a reminder of how little what I call the Standard Critique of Technology has progressed in the intervening half-century. That’s why I am increasingly focused on seeking some way of evading the situation that Mumford so incisively and disturbingly identifies: “once one opts for the system no further choice remains.” There is of course a radical way to become unbribed: to go off the grid, to disconnect wholly. But is there a way less radical? Throwing the toothpaste away is simple enough, though perhaps not easy; but can you get it back into the tube? That’s what I, coward and weakling that I am, want to know.
alliances
[Wendell] Berry is a serious Christian, and also a serious reader of poetry. His prose is studded with quotations from the Bible and the poetic canon. It may be surprising (though it shouldn’t be, really) how easy it is to find a text in Homer, Virgil, Dante, Shakespeare, Blake, or Wordsworth celebrating humility, fortitude, magnanimity, chastity, marital fidelity, or some other Christian (though not exclusively Christian) virtue. Character and virtue are indeed fragile, and it’s reasonable to exploit all the resources of human culture to shore them up. But although it lends his writing gravity and grace, I’m sorry that Berry insists on giving the agrarian ethos a religious framework and on situating human flourishing within a “Great Economy,” by which he means not Gaia but the “Kingdom of God.” As a result, he speaks less persuasively than he might to those of us who feel that our civilization has somehow gone wrong, and that at least some part of traditional wisdom is indeed wisdom, but who cannot believe that this universe is the work of the Christian God, or of any God. And yet we need Berry’s preaching as much as anyone. Jesus came, after all, to call sinners, not the just, to good farming practices.
Our culture’s great need today is for a pious paganism, a virtuous rationalism, skeptical and science-loving but skeptical even of science when necessary, aware that barbarism is as likely as progress and may even arrive advertised as progress, steadily angry at the money-changers and mindful of the least of our brethren. I don’t see how anyone who shares Berry’s Christian beliefs could fail to adopt his ideal of stewardship. But if those religious beliefs are necessary as well as sufficient — if there is no other path to that ideal, as he sometimes seems to imply — then we may be lost. One cannot believe at will.
Of another ex-Marxist, Dwight Macdonald, Scialabba once wrote that though Macdonald “despaired of politics,” he “was an exemplary amateur,” for he “sought to apply to our politics and culture the strict critical standards of an honest intellectual craftsman — standards at once deeply conservative and deeply subversive.” That last phrase encapsulates why Scialabba’s detection of a final incompatibility between the ideas of those like himself and those of people like Berry — a group that includes me, at least by distant aspiration — is too quick. What irks, finally, is not that he misreads or fails to sympathize with Berry’s work, but that he misses that Berry is, or can be, a co-belligerent, if not a comrade, in a shared project. Scialabba can see this clearly in the case of former communists “hurt into” disenchantment and exile; he should see it too in Berry.
True, Berry is a certain kind of Christian and a certain kind of conservative, but just for that reason he is also a certain kind of friend to Scialabba’s goals for the world’s improvement. Not all of them, to be sure, but who can find a friend like that? On the contrary: given the overturned table of contemporary politics, it’s catch as catch can. All the more so if Berry’s art, like Chiaromonte’s, like Macdonald’s, avoids a moralistic reduction of politics to personal responsibility, and embodies instead the refusal to separate what belongs together: truth and justice, art and activism, private and public. That refusal was radical in their time, and it remains radical today.
Those institutions that actually hurt the oppressed you can only oppose with the slow, unsexy, decidedly uncool work of mundane political organizing, knocking on doors and putting up flyers and patiently speaking to people whose minds might be changed. The threat of investment banks is vastly larger to the average poor person of color than the threat of Boogaloo Boys, but antifa have no tools for confronting the former.
We think of climate change as a separate issue on our priority list, but the only reason you care about climate change is because of what’s already at the top of your list – keeping your job, taking care of your family, worrying about your health, worrying about your kids, worrying about the place where you live – whatever it is that you’re already worrying about.When you are taking action for climate, it’s not for climate change, it’s for you. It’s for your family, it’s for everything you love, everyone you love, every place that you love – that’s why you’re doing it. There’s a significant mind shift there, so that we don’t see it as an extra “to do” on our list.
I. Properly speaking, global thinking is not possible. Those who have "thought globally" (and among them the most successful have been imperial governments and multinational corporations) have done so by means of simplifications too extreme and oppressive to merit the name of thought. Global thinkers have been, and will be, dangerous people. National thinkers tend to be dangerous also; we now have national thinkers in the northeastern United States who look upon Kentucky as a garbage dump.
II. Global thinking can only be statistical. Its shallowness is exposed by the least intention to do something. Unless one is willing to be destructive on a very large scale, one cannot do something except locally, in a small place. Global thinking can only do to the globe what a space satellite does to it: reduce it, make a bauble of it. Look at one of those photographs of half the earth taken from outer space, and see if you recognize your neighborhood. If you want to see where you are, you will have to get out of your space vehicle, out of your car, off your horse, and walk over the ground. On foot you will find that the earth is still satisfyingly large, and full of beguiling nooks and crannies.
Many conservatives tend to assume that economic outcomes in capitalist economies are “natural.” Yet there is nothing less natural than severing the connection between economic growth and family formation. For millennia, human beings have viewed children as an asset, not a cost, for the simple reason that children provided additional labor and looked after their parents in old age. It is only in the last century that this link has been severed.
We now have a system that forces would-be parents to think of their children as a cost and not an asset. Yet these children are quite literally the most valuable asset that any country could possibly possess. Without children, a society withers and dies while its economy is converted into something resembling a chaotic nursing home, where a shrinking workforce slaves away to service a growing pool of retirees (as the specter of forced euthanasia lurks in the background).
UATX
We expect to face significant resistance to this project. There are networks of donors, foundations, and activists that uphold and promote the status quo. There are parents who expect the status quo. There are students who demand it, along with even greater restrictions on academic freedom. And there are administrators and professors who will feel threatened by any disruption to the system.
We welcome their opprobrium and will regard it as vindication.
To the rest — to those of you who share our sense that something fundamental is broken — we ask that you join us in our effort to renew higher education. We welcome all who share our mission to pursue a truly liberating education — and hope that other founders follow our example.
It is time to restore the meaning to those old school mottos. Light. Truth. The wind of freedom. You will find all three at our new university in Austin.
I don’t know whether this is going to work, but I think it’s a wonderfully exciting endeavor. In the American university today, the systemic and/or emergent silencing of those who dissent from or even merely question the Successor Ideology is made possible by the belief, by all parties involved, that the dissidents have nowhere else to go. But what if they do have somewhere else to go? And what if philanthropists who wish to support higher education have a choice between institutions with long-recognized prestige — always an irresistible draw in the past — and institutions that fit the philanthropists’ ideals?
(One thing I don't understand: the presence of Sohrab Amari on the university’s Board of Advisors. Isn’t its classical liberalism antithetical to his frequently-articulated vision of the social world as an arena for defeating your enemies in ideological combat and enjoying the spoils of your victory?)
This will be very, very interesting. A tiny bit of me wants to check Twitter to enjoy the inevitable DEFCON 1 meltdown — but all the rest of me immediately slapped down that tiny bit and I don’t think we’ll be hearing from it again.
This was a blog post, wasn’t it? Dammit.
To earn membership in a group you must send signals that clearly indicate that you differentially support it, compared to rival groups. Hence, optimal weighting of beliefs and communications in the individual mind will make it feel good to think and express content conforming to and flattering to one’s group’s shared beliefs and to attack and misrepresent rival groups. The more biased away from neutral truth, the better the communication functions to affirm coalitional identity, generating polarization in excess of actual policy disagreements. […]
This raises a problem for scientists: Coalition-mindedness makes everyone, including scientists, far stupider in coalitional collectivities than as individuals. Paradoxically, a political party united by supernatural beliefs can revise its beliefs about economics or climate without revisers being bad coalition members. But people whose coalitional membership is constituted by their shared adherence to “rational,” scientific propositions have a problem when — as is generally the case — new information arises which requires belief revision. To question or disagree with coalitional precepts, even for rational reasons, makes one a bad and immoral coalition member — at risk of losing job offers, one's friends, and one's cherished group identity. This freezes belief revision.
Forming coalitions around scientific or factual questions is disastrous, because it pits our urge for scientific truth-seeking against the nearly insuperable human appetite to be a good coalition member. Once scientific propositions are moralized, the scientific process is wounded, often fatally. No one is behaving either ethically or scientifically who does not make the best case possible for rival theories with which one disagrees.