History repeating before our eyes.
I’m reading a book published in 1939: The Sleepwalkers: A History of Man’s Changing Universe, by Arthur Koestler. This book seems to fall into the realm of these three books: The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, by Edward Gibbon, A Study of History [Abridged], by Arnold J. Toynbee, The Decline of the West, by Oswald Spengler.), but I’m only to page 53 of 542, not counting notes and index.
This is the passage that got me off my duff and into writing an increasingly rare post in this weblog:
(Both Plato and Aristotle) founded “schools” of a new kind… which served for centuries as organized institutions… They evolved systems of philosophies which, though different…, taken jointly seemed to provide a complete answer to the predicament of their time.
The predicament was the political, economic and moral bankruptcy of classical Greece prior to the Macedonian conquest (by Phillip II, Alexander’s father). A century of constant war and civil strife had bled the country of men and money; venality and corruption were poisoning public life; hordes of political exiles, reduced to the existence of homeless adventurers, were roaming the countryside; legalized abortion and infanticide were further thinning out the rank of its citizens…
History, once again, is repeating, it seems.
The Pavellas Perspective 
The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun. Is there any thing whereof it may be said, See, this is new? it hath been already of old time, which was before us.
LikeLike
Ah, yes, Ecclesiastes–wisdom from ancient times…
LikeLike
In modern Western history, this pattern seems to repeat every few generations. That is the basis of the generations theory by William Strauss and Neil Howe. Periods of decline happen and then society rebuilds. Wash and repeat.
The world is always ending. The world is always beginning again. And every single time there is moral panic, as if it’s never happened before, and as if this time will be the final collapse, maybe even the End Times itself.
LikeLike
Yes, but I wonder if the development of the Internet and associated technologies might have brought something so novel into the mix that something outside this pattern might occur.
LikeLike
I wonder that myself. Many things are genuinely different this time around. The exact point you make here has been on my mind as of late. But I wouldn’t limit to internet but all modern electronic media: telephone, radio, film, television, cable, etc. Think about the moral panic around video games back in the ’80s and ’90s, or even plain role playing games like Dungeons and Dragons.
I came across a quote from about three-quarters of a century ago. The individual was warning about the threat of radio in bringing an intimate voice right into people’s personal space. He worried about how this could be used to influence and manipulate people, particularly with the rise of totalitarianism at the time. A not unrealistic concern, in retrospect.
I’ve come across similar fears about telephones, back when they were a new technology. The protective barrier of a home’s walls was made permeable and penetrable. Anyone could call your daughter at home and who knows what they might talk about. Madness could ensue. No doubt the telephone really did transform our society.
Yet it also can’t be denied that the internet, along with smart phones, brings it all to a whole new level. Taking all of this media tech together, it’s a real humdinger. Going by Plato’s fears, even written text disrupted civilization and was rightly seen as a threat to oral culture.
But humanity had several millennia to slowly adapt to printed text before we finally got around to mass literacy. All of these other new technologies are coming fast like a tidal wave, one after another. We don’t get a chance to catch our breath before the next transformative tech has changed everything again.
Plus, there are other technologies that have altered and strained the world, if we tend to ignore them. There is mass transportation, quick long distance travel by plane, car culture (and suburbia), artificial lighting (messing up circadian rhythms), air conditioning (keeping us stuck indoors), etc. In the US, mass urbanization and industrialization is only about a century old, a blink of the eye in history.
Then we have the total overturning of the environment: mass extinction, ecosystem collapse, climate change, global warming, weather extremes, shifting weather patterns, droughts, floods, wildfires, etc. That contributes and exacerbates civil resource stress, famine, civil conflict, refugee crises, mass immigration, etc. All of that is likely pushing us toward WWIII, a war that will be technological like never before seen.
Capitalist realism as late stage capitalism just tops it all off with economic desperation, high inequality, and some new form of totalitarianism that is a mix of soft fascism and inverted totalitarianism. Nearly the entire world has been commodified and privatized, a profound change from all of human existence before quite recently. But we act like it’s completely normal.
So, yeah, the world is always ending. And yet it’s plausible to think it really could end this time. We humans are genuinely capable of destroying ourselves, taking down civilization as we know it, or otherwise making our lives hellish. We seem so ignorant, oblivious, and cavalier about what we are doing to the world and to ourselves.
LikeLike
Moral panics about media technology (i.e., media panic), if not new, are telling. The first and still the largest media panic was rising literacy rates heading into mass literacy, already starting to happen several centuries ago in the West. There was a full-fledged media panic in the 1700s directed at the then new romance novel genre that had become popular among the youth, as printing presses spread in making reading materials cheaper and more accessible. This created a generational divide between those who grew up before and during this change, with the standard generational conflict: “Kids these days!”
Just like with 20th and 21st century personal tech, the youth were literally walking around with their faces stuck in books; while the older generations were fear-mongering about moral degradation, mental illness, and suicides, along with civilizational decline or whatever. There was a sense that something had drastically, maybe permanently and dangerously, changed and that assessment turned out to be correct. Not only social change but also that of psychology. As John Adams would later explain, the revolution of mind preceded and made possible the revolution of politics.
That is to say the American Revolution likely could not have happened without that technological revolution. Those printing presses, in producing novels, were likely increasing cognitive empathy; and so helping people to understand the perspectives of those different from them: slaves, the poor, women, natives, etc. But also being printed were new radical texts that were sometimes written by the an emergent literate and educated working class (e.g., Thomas Paine). That is not unlike what happened in Classical Athens, about which the aristocrats Socrates and Plato complained.
Ancient literacy led to the development of the lowly rising up into a new middle class through literacy and education. In both Classical Athens and in 18th century Anglo-America, any schmuck who happened to get some money could better themselves in this way. In Classical Athens, there were the sophists who would teach anyone with the means to pay them. And in London, though the lower classes weren’t allowed into the universities, professors would make money on the side by offering lectures. That is what Paine did. After coming into money from working as a privateer (i.e., legal pirate), he went to lectures, bought books, and procured scientific instruments. That is how how guy raised as a tradesman eventually came to hobnob among aristocrats like Jefferson and Washington.
Similar to the rise of capitalism, international trade, industrialization, and a literary culture in the 18th century, without the past century of technological advancements, we wouldn’t have seen the Populist Era, the Progressive Era, WWI, WWII, Civil Rights Movement, multiple anti-war movements, LA Race Riots, Occupy, Tea Party, BLM, and much else. Who knows what will result in the coming decades from the internet and such, with already seeing signs of the next wave of technological inventions. But it’s almost guaranteed to be at a revolutionary level, whether or not it precipitates an actual political revolution like the one that founded the United States.
There is another kind of revolution of the mind, such as seen in the Renaissance and the Enlightenment through technological devices like the microscope, telescope, and sextant. Different technologies alter scientific research, public debate, and so cause even further technological development. In “Stranger Than We Can Imagine,” John C. Higgs details the complete overhaul of society at the turn of the 20th century, in ways that were unpredictable and created a world over the following century that was alien to what came before. We are still living in that tidal wave, maybe only now beginning to crest.
The truth of this stands out to me because I follow the most recent advancements in numerous fields: biology (microbiome, psychobiotics, terrain theory of microbes, hygiene hypothesis, diet, nutrition, fasting, exercise, quantum biology, epigenetics, etc), mind (personality research, consciousness studies, philology, linguistic relativity, etc), society (anthropology, history, religion, economics, political science, parasite-stress theory, behavioral immune system, agriculture, food systems, etc), and environment (5E cognition, hyperobjects, climate change, ecology, toxins, hormone mimics and disruptors, agrochemicals, etc). That is on top of my general awareness of other developments: alternative energy, 3D printing, laser cutters, etc.
There has never been so much vast and innovative ‘progress’ in all of human existence, arguably in all of earthly existence; although to be fair the invention of cellular life was quite a radical breakthrough at the time that had some noticeable impact in having literally transformed the entire planet into a thriving biosphere. Even to limit ourselves to human-caused changes, the present can be thought of as part of an ongoing revolution. One can see the originating point as late modernity, the early modern revolutionary period. the Enlightenment Age, the Protestant Reformation, the Renaissance, the Axial Age, the Bronze Age collapse, or the Agricultural Revolution.
We don’t appreciate it because most of the changes were gradual and slow, with breaking points of crisis and disruption largely being forgotten when they were over. Every generation has taken as normal all of the changes that happened before they were born or at least before they were old enough to understand, even if the entire society they lived in had been turned on its head just the generation before. Humans have collective memories only slightly longer than that of a fruit fly. Combined with baseline bias, the nature of the such totalizing changes are hard to notice because the entire context is altered. The very ground beneath one shifts, but because one shifts with the ground it feels like one is still in the same place. This causes anxiousness, though, because if only on an unconscious level one recognizes everything is not quite the same.
Consider a parallel or even directly related example. From “The Invisible Plague,” Edwin Fuller Torrey and Judy Miller write: “Living amid an ongoing epidemic that nobody notices is surreal. It is like viewing a mighty river that has risen slowly over two centuries, imperceptibly claiming the surrounding land, millimeter by millimeter. . . . Humans adapt remarkably well to a disaster as long as the disaster occurs over a long period of time. At the end of the seventeenth century, insanity was of little significance and was little discussed. At the end of the eighteenth century, it was perceived as probably increasing and was of some concern. At the end of the nineteenth century, it was perceived as an epidemic and was a major concern. And at the end of the twentieth century, insanity was simply accepted as part of the fabric of life. It is a remarkable history.”
The last quote used in the following piece about the pscycho-social disruption from the 19th to early 20th centuries, of which you commented on:
LikeLike
An excellent seminar, from my POV.
LikeLike
I maintain my right to withhold my opinion about whether all of this is good or bad. I just like to note for the record that it’s happening and we should pay attention.
I tend to prefer my agnostic approach of laying out the facts. But depending on my mood, I’m fully capable of throwing down a spirited jeremiad about doom and gloom or fantasizing about the Star Trek future history of a socialist eutopia.
LikeLike