Disilllusionment is not an excuse for not recreating a culture rooted in Nature and emotional self-mastery, a culture of "enough" and high intelligence rather than materialism. Wealth and power are great distractions, but not life. We have done and can do better than this. It starts by finding a grounding and divesting your hubris.
People are tribal. They want to belong. The easiest, if most cowardly, avenue toward belonging is to presume one's superiority over others, because one belongs to a like-minded tribe. It is to easy to mistake vast numbers of fellow tribesmen as proof that one's ideas are correct. When impressions and intuition matter more than knowledge and analysis, the world falls to Trumpism, with tragic pride in its seeming success.
People too often lack the courage to respond strongly early in a crisis, when the total effort needed to resolve a problem is far less than will accumulate with repeated, useless future efforts. The best time to act is behind us, but NOW is the next and only next best available time.
As you no doubt know, The Dark Ages is a misnomer created during the Renaissance by people wanting to tie themselves to the glory of Anchient Greece and Rome while disparaging achievements from the intervening 1000 years. It’s not unlike the way the current crop of fascists are obsessed with the power of the Roman Empire. There was a lot of human flourishing during the Middle Ages, but most of it did not happen in the heart of Western Europe, so the achievements were minimized. I can imagine something like that happening now. While the US may enter a “Dark Age,” humanity is likely to continue flourishing elsewhere. It might be in China or India, or maybe the global South. The US is on track to make itself a backwater of fear and superstition. I don’t think the light of humanity will be completely extinguished.
The "arc of history" bends towards greater justice only if we constantly pressure it to do so: the (post)modern sophists are actively working against that arc
Are you asking about how to apply pressure to the arc of history or how the postmodern left empowers the forces of injustice? Or something else entirely?
Singing to the choir. I am doing the same thing you are doing. Writing. Because I am not rich, I cannot influence the Supreme Court and I do not have any drones.
It’s funny how people picture a new Dark Age like it’s going to arrive with plagues, torches, and monks frantically copying TikToks onto parchment. Meanwhile the real version is already here and somehow dumber. We’ve got entire political movements that treat ignorance as a sacrament and expertise as witchcraft. The medieval peasants at least wanted someone who could read.
And you’re right. This isn’t a persuasion job anymore. You can’t reason someone out of a worldview they built to protect themselves from reasoning. This is moral leadership territory. Intellectual aikido. The reclamation of the commons from people who think Google is a Deep State sorcery box.
Blessed be the ones who still use their minds in a century that keeps rewarding the opposite. May the keepers of the lamp stop waiting for permission to light the room.
"The most frustrating thing about current analysis/punditry (with exceptions) is that there is no accountability. There is no collective memory or judgement on those who make appalling assessments, and no consideration of the consequences of their work."
The great universities were founded with the explicit mission of forming moral character. The subject matter was variously intended to support that mission. Yet those universities have mutated to the point that many of our most perverse political and business leaders hold their degrees, while proudly displaying a total lack of what any educated person of earlier centuries would recognize as ethics, pretending that in this they share the consciousness of the common man (not woman) -- whom they insultingly presume to lack moral fiber just as they do.
All this while their allies promote a fake Christianity which anyone trained in the Harvard of Princeton of the 17 or 18 hundreds would instantly recognize for the fraud it is. So, how do we restore character to the center of the academic mission? And how do we get our academics to crawl back from the tenuous branches of specialized, often irrelevant studies, to deal with the central issues of our polycrisis, where we need the total effort of our best minds if civilization is to survive?
Maintain local community offline is key to finding our way out. Grifters will not release their grip on our online discourse so we need to find other ways to keep knowledge alive. It makes me wonder if a dead internet is actually needed to for us to find our way again.
I’ve always hoped, even sometimes believed, that human consciousness would inexorably evolve toward greater knowledge, enlightenment, mercy, justice, and love. That we’d find a way to slay or tame our inner beasts of ignorance, cruelty, and the Seven Deadly Sins. But the shackles that tie us to our inner beasts are deeply forged over millions of years and do not readily yield to a mere few thousand years of epistemic anti-entropic efforts, give or take a few centuries of recent progress. We are bound to our beasts and their horrors for many ages yet to come…
This is, indeed, a new dark age in America. The administration today announced that it intends to close the National Center for Atmospheric Research, ostensibly because they are producing "climate alarmism", but really because the state of Colorado won't release a felon, convicted in state court on election-related charges, that Trump wants pardoned and released - as if the flooding of Washington State, the record-setting heat across the southwest, and all the other weather and climate emergencies the U.S. and world experience daily weren't good cause for "climate alarmism".
Instead of researching the climate, proposing solutions, and building renewable energy, of course, we're going to war with Venezuela* - for oil. The administration has admitted this; while the planned invasion of Venezuela is ostensibly about "drugs", it is actually about the oil resources that Venezuela nationalized over the years (and compensated us for at the time).
Truly, an American Dark Age.
*"Either you all give yourselves up, and let us beat you up a little, though not too much, because we are firmly opposed to needless violence, or we blow up this entire country! And one or two others that we noticed on the way over."
“To the circles of Hell, for example, he [Dante] added a realm of sinners of his own invention—those who never make a true commitment to a cause, who live ‘without disgrace yet without praise’ and are confined (plagued by wasps and stinging flies) with the angels who took no side when Lucifer made war on God. Dante had certainly hated this type in life; the shock here is how many of these indifferent souls there are. ‘I had not thought death had undone so many,’ T. S. Eliot wrote, in ‘The Waste Land,’ using Dante’s realization to transpose a scene of medieval Hell to twentieth-century London, where crowds of commuters move dully through brown morning fog, their eyes fixed just beyond their feet as if they, too, will never see the sky again.” — By Claudia Roth Pierpont, “Where Dante Guides Us”
Clearly this won't just go away when/if Trump dies, since he was more a symptom than an ultimate cause. He is however, a better catalyst than anyone else in the regressive movement, and they will be severely handicapped if they lose him. That is why they still cling to him despite his liabilities.
Oh, I believe you. The problem is how do we fight such ignorance when our education systems have been gutted? It will be a long road back.
Generations. Decades. If ever.
Disilllusionment is not an excuse for not recreating a culture rooted in Nature and emotional self-mastery, a culture of "enough" and high intelligence rather than materialism. Wealth and power are great distractions, but not life. We have done and can do better than this. It starts by finding a grounding and divesting your hubris.
People are tribal. They want to belong. The easiest, if most cowardly, avenue toward belonging is to presume one's superiority over others, because one belongs to a like-minded tribe. It is to easy to mistake vast numbers of fellow tribesmen as proof that one's ideas are correct. When impressions and intuition matter more than knowledge and analysis, the world falls to Trumpism, with tragic pride in its seeming success.
People too often lack the courage to respond strongly early in a crisis, when the total effort needed to resolve a problem is far less than will accumulate with repeated, useless future efforts. The best time to act is behind us, but NOW is the next and only next best available time.
As you no doubt know, The Dark Ages is a misnomer created during the Renaissance by people wanting to tie themselves to the glory of Anchient Greece and Rome while disparaging achievements from the intervening 1000 years. It’s not unlike the way the current crop of fascists are obsessed with the power of the Roman Empire. There was a lot of human flourishing during the Middle Ages, but most of it did not happen in the heart of Western Europe, so the achievements were minimized. I can imagine something like that happening now. While the US may enter a “Dark Age,” humanity is likely to continue flourishing elsewhere. It might be in China or India, or maybe the global South. The US is on track to make itself a backwater of fear and superstition. I don’t think the light of humanity will be completely extinguished.
The "arc of history" bends towards greater justice only if we constantly pressure it to do so: the (post)modern sophists are actively working against that arc
Are you asking about how to apply pressure to the arc of history or how the postmodern left empowers the forces of injustice? Or something else entirely?
How?
Singing to the choir. I am doing the same thing you are doing. Writing. Because I am not rich, I cannot influence the Supreme Court and I do not have any drones.
It’s funny how people picture a new Dark Age like it’s going to arrive with plagues, torches, and monks frantically copying TikToks onto parchment. Meanwhile the real version is already here and somehow dumber. We’ve got entire political movements that treat ignorance as a sacrament and expertise as witchcraft. The medieval peasants at least wanted someone who could read.
And you’re right. This isn’t a persuasion job anymore. You can’t reason someone out of a worldview they built to protect themselves from reasoning. This is moral leadership territory. Intellectual aikido. The reclamation of the commons from people who think Google is a Deep State sorcery box.
Blessed be the ones who still use their minds in a century that keeps rewarding the opposite. May the keepers of the lamp stop waiting for permission to light the room.
"The most frustrating thing about current analysis/punditry (with exceptions) is that there is no accountability. There is no collective memory or judgement on those who make appalling assessments, and no consideration of the consequences of their work."
https://open.substack.com/pub/adamure/p/analytical-accountability-on-russia
The great universities were founded with the explicit mission of forming moral character. The subject matter was variously intended to support that mission. Yet those universities have mutated to the point that many of our most perverse political and business leaders hold their degrees, while proudly displaying a total lack of what any educated person of earlier centuries would recognize as ethics, pretending that in this they share the consciousness of the common man (not woman) -- whom they insultingly presume to lack moral fiber just as they do.
All this while their allies promote a fake Christianity which anyone trained in the Harvard of Princeton of the 17 or 18 hundreds would instantly recognize for the fraud it is. So, how do we restore character to the center of the academic mission? And how do we get our academics to crawl back from the tenuous branches of specialized, often irrelevant studies, to deal with the central issues of our polycrisis, where we need the total effort of our best minds if civilization is to survive?
Maintain local community offline is key to finding our way out. Grifters will not release their grip on our online discourse so we need to find other ways to keep knowledge alive. It makes me wonder if a dead internet is actually needed to for us to find our way again.
The unenlightenment
I’ve always hoped, even sometimes believed, that human consciousness would inexorably evolve toward greater knowledge, enlightenment, mercy, justice, and love. That we’d find a way to slay or tame our inner beasts of ignorance, cruelty, and the Seven Deadly Sins. But the shackles that tie us to our inner beasts are deeply forged over millions of years and do not readily yield to a mere few thousand years of epistemic anti-entropic efforts, give or take a few centuries of recent progress. We are bound to our beasts and their horrors for many ages yet to come…
Oh yes, it is
This is, indeed, a new dark age in America. The administration today announced that it intends to close the National Center for Atmospheric Research, ostensibly because they are producing "climate alarmism", but really because the state of Colorado won't release a felon, convicted in state court on election-related charges, that Trump wants pardoned and released - as if the flooding of Washington State, the record-setting heat across the southwest, and all the other weather and climate emergencies the U.S. and world experience daily weren't good cause for "climate alarmism".
Instead of researching the climate, proposing solutions, and building renewable energy, of course, we're going to war with Venezuela* - for oil. The administration has admitted this; while the planned invasion of Venezuela is ostensibly about "drugs", it is actually about the oil resources that Venezuela nationalized over the years (and compensated us for at the time).
Truly, an American Dark Age.
*"Either you all give yourselves up, and let us beat you up a little, though not too much, because we are firmly opposed to needless violence, or we blow up this entire country! And one or two others that we noticed on the way over."
“To the circles of Hell, for example, he [Dante] added a realm of sinners of his own invention—those who never make a true commitment to a cause, who live ‘without disgrace yet without praise’ and are confined (plagued by wasps and stinging flies) with the angels who took no side when Lucifer made war on God. Dante had certainly hated this type in life; the shock here is how many of these indifferent souls there are. ‘I had not thought death had undone so many,’ T. S. Eliot wrote, in ‘The Waste Land,’ using Dante’s realization to transpose a scene of medieval Hell to twentieth-century London, where crowds of commuters move dully through brown morning fog, their eyes fixed just beyond their feet as if they, too, will never see the sky again.” — By Claudia Roth Pierpont, “Where Dante Guides Us”
Clearly this won't just go away when/if Trump dies, since he was more a symptom than an ultimate cause. He is however, a better catalyst than anyone else in the regressive movement, and they will be severely handicapped if they lose him. That is why they still cling to him despite his liabilities.