Gloomy post of gloom
"The world under heaven, after a long period of division, tends to unite; after a long period of union, tends to divide. This has been so since antiquity."
So starts The Romance of the Three Kingdoms, set in the C2nd to C3rd CE in China and traditionally said to have been written in the C14th. You could say this is the epitome of a sort of cyclical, ebb-and-flow view of history.
Another way of seeing history is as a decline. Hesiod, writing in about 700 BCE, posited Five Ages of Man, a sequence from the Golden Age, when humans lived among the gods, downwards through the Silver and Bronze Ages, with a brief respite in the Heroic Age, and then to his own time, the Iron Age, where humans scratch out a poor life of misery and toil. Ovid, writing around the C1st, thought similarly but dropped the Heroic Age to give an account where everything just gets crappier over time.
But of course, many people at present see things as generally getting better over time. From the Enlightenment in the C18th onwards, people - well, specifically a few well-off European privileged intellectual men - started to see history as an improvement over time. And more and more people began to have a way of life where their everyday existence wasn't a sharp contradiction of that view, and by the C19th in America, almost anyone (well, specifically white and European and privileged anyones) could aspire to the dream 'this year better than last year, and next year better still'. Of course, any of them would argue, things don't get linearly better, and they don't get better for everyone all the time.
This Whiggish view of history has been looked down on in intellectual circles since at least the 1930s, and since postmodernism it's precisely the sort of ridiculous grand narrative respectable intellectuals can't take seriously any more. Wilson might have been keen on harnessing Science for Progress but he was out of touch with the latest thinking.
Despite the appearances, I like to think that at bottom I'm quite a simple, naive sort of person. The stone you kick thusly does exist. What exists is more fundamental than what you think about it. It's a very good idea to check what you think against what exists, as best you can. On this basis, things have been looking up. Mortality and morbidity are in sharp retreat: life expectancy in the UK soared in the C20th. Median incomes are a very rough and ready measure, and money does not make you happy, but overall having more money tends to at least make your misery a bit more comfortable. Hans Rosling can show you some statistics on this that will make your heart soar.
But this is not inevitable. There's nothing that means that this has to continue.
Living standards for most people in the US have stagnated. It's not been quite so bad here in the UK, but the IFS have just looked at the Autumn Statement and have calculated that on the OBR estimates, average incomes (by which I think they must mean medians) will be lower in 2021 than they were in 2008. I've not read anyone saying 'stagflation' again recently but I don't really understand why not.
And, of course, there have been Certain Major Political Events which look like they point in the same direction for what's happening in the social level of reality: Brexit, Trump, and just this evening, France facing a choice for its President of a social conservative promising to slash the state (François Fillon) or the National Front in the shape of Marine le Pen. (And for the avoidance of doubt, this is not the way I would regard as upwards.)
History doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme, as Mark Twain probably didn't say.
So some people have been worrying that the current times rhyme with the 1930s, and thus that we could be facing 10 or 15 years of things becoming really very awful before they slowly start to get better. On this account, we could be facing many decades before things are better again. My big worry is that they're wrong.
Rome was the first city in human history to reach one million inhabitants, around the C1st/C2nd CE. It famously declined and fell, and it didn't reach one million inhabitants again until 1,800 years later. There were no cities so large and complex in Europe between the decline of ancient Rome and the rise of London (by about 1810, from memory), and there were only two anywhere in the world: Xi'an/Chang'an, where my father was born, in around 850, and arguably Angkor a few centuries later.
The astonishingly complex machinery that is the world economy stuttered and nearly stopped in 2008; we hauled it back from the brink but we still don't really understand it even at the basic level that might tell us whether raising interest rates will increase or decrease inflation, or whether cheaper oil is a good or bad thing for the UK economy. If we don't understand it, it's hard to be confident we'll be able to fix it if it breaks again.
The really scary prospect is that it's not decades before things get better than this, it's that it could be centuries, or millennia. Or never.
I do think that's a long shot. There's nothing that says that improvement is inevitable, but there's plenty that says that decline is unlikely. We are vastly more capable and smart than we have ever been as a species. Life expectancy is still on average going up; mortality is going down. And just the other day I saw yet more evidence that things are getting better even in old age: yes, there's a lot more dementia, but only because there's a lot more older people (which is good news!). Dementia is actually becoming less prevalent on a per-capita basis, and the average age of onset of is going up, despite greater awareness and earlier diagnosis that would tend to push it downwards.
All this is from working together, understanding the world as it actually is, and using that to make things better, for everyone. It's not inevitable that we'll continue to succeed, but the results so far are encouraging, and it's sure as hell worth trying.
This entry crossposted to http://doug.dreamwidth.org/325939.html, where there are
comment(s) not shown here.
So starts The Romance of the Three Kingdoms, set in the C2nd to C3rd CE in China and traditionally said to have been written in the C14th. You could say this is the epitome of a sort of cyclical, ebb-and-flow view of history.
Another way of seeing history is as a decline. Hesiod, writing in about 700 BCE, posited Five Ages of Man, a sequence from the Golden Age, when humans lived among the gods, downwards through the Silver and Bronze Ages, with a brief respite in the Heroic Age, and then to his own time, the Iron Age, where humans scratch out a poor life of misery and toil. Ovid, writing around the C1st, thought similarly but dropped the Heroic Age to give an account where everything just gets crappier over time.
But of course, many people at present see things as generally getting better over time. From the Enlightenment in the C18th onwards, people - well, specifically a few well-off European privileged intellectual men - started to see history as an improvement over time. And more and more people began to have a way of life where their everyday existence wasn't a sharp contradiction of that view, and by the C19th in America, almost anyone (well, specifically white and European and privileged anyones) could aspire to the dream 'this year better than last year, and next year better still'. Of course, any of them would argue, things don't get linearly better, and they don't get better for everyone all the time.
This Whiggish view of history has been looked down on in intellectual circles since at least the 1930s, and since postmodernism it's precisely the sort of ridiculous grand narrative respectable intellectuals can't take seriously any more. Wilson might have been keen on harnessing Science for Progress but he was out of touch with the latest thinking.
Despite the appearances, I like to think that at bottom I'm quite a simple, naive sort of person. The stone you kick thusly does exist. What exists is more fundamental than what you think about it. It's a very good idea to check what you think against what exists, as best you can. On this basis, things have been looking up. Mortality and morbidity are in sharp retreat: life expectancy in the UK soared in the C20th. Median incomes are a very rough and ready measure, and money does not make you happy, but overall having more money tends to at least make your misery a bit more comfortable. Hans Rosling can show you some statistics on this that will make your heart soar.
But this is not inevitable. There's nothing that means that this has to continue.
Living standards for most people in the US have stagnated. It's not been quite so bad here in the UK, but the IFS have just looked at the Autumn Statement and have calculated that on the OBR estimates, average incomes (by which I think they must mean medians) will be lower in 2021 than they were in 2008. I've not read anyone saying 'stagflation' again recently but I don't really understand why not.
And, of course, there have been Certain Major Political Events which look like they point in the same direction for what's happening in the social level of reality: Brexit, Trump, and just this evening, France facing a choice for its President of a social conservative promising to slash the state (François Fillon) or the National Front in the shape of Marine le Pen. (And for the avoidance of doubt, this is not the way I would regard as upwards.)
History doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme, as Mark Twain probably didn't say.
So some people have been worrying that the current times rhyme with the 1930s, and thus that we could be facing 10 or 15 years of things becoming really very awful before they slowly start to get better. On this account, we could be facing many decades before things are better again. My big worry is that they're wrong.
Rome was the first city in human history to reach one million inhabitants, around the C1st/C2nd CE. It famously declined and fell, and it didn't reach one million inhabitants again until 1,800 years later. There were no cities so large and complex in Europe between the decline of ancient Rome and the rise of London (by about 1810, from memory), and there were only two anywhere in the world: Xi'an/Chang'an, where my father was born, in around 850, and arguably Angkor a few centuries later.
The astonishingly complex machinery that is the world economy stuttered and nearly stopped in 2008; we hauled it back from the brink but we still don't really understand it even at the basic level that might tell us whether raising interest rates will increase or decrease inflation, or whether cheaper oil is a good or bad thing for the UK economy. If we don't understand it, it's hard to be confident we'll be able to fix it if it breaks again.
The really scary prospect is that it's not decades before things get better than this, it's that it could be centuries, or millennia. Or never.
I do think that's a long shot. There's nothing that says that improvement is inevitable, but there's plenty that says that decline is unlikely. We are vastly more capable and smart than we have ever been as a species. Life expectancy is still on average going up; mortality is going down. And just the other day I saw yet more evidence that things are getting better even in old age: yes, there's a lot more dementia, but only because there's a lot more older people (which is good news!). Dementia is actually becoming less prevalent on a per-capita basis, and the average age of onset of is going up, despite greater awareness and earlier diagnosis that would tend to push it downwards.
All this is from working together, understanding the world as it actually is, and using that to make things better, for everyone. It's not inevitable that we'll continue to succeed, but the results so far are encouraging, and it's sure as hell worth trying.
This entry crossposted to http://doug.dreamwidth.org/325939.html, where there are
comment(s) not shown here.