Posts Tagged ‘change’
“Enough is abundance to the wise”*…
The “new” idea of Abundance is having a moment. The estimable David Karpf worries that the folks behind it are blowing their opportunity…
I guess I would call myself “Abundance-curious.”
There is a version of the Abundance agenda that I quite vocally agree with. My interpretation of Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s central argument was something along these lines:
- Government should have a strong hand in establishing, directing, and funding social priorities.
- In the course of setting these priorities, government should endeavor to get out of its own way.
Klein and Thompson are pretty firmly in favor of government intervention and industrial policy. They aren’t just saying “growth is good and we should all cheer for developers!” They are instead saying something more along the lines of, if the government thinks something – housing, clean energy, etc – is a priority, then the government should proactively support that goal. Put money behind it. Don’t leave everything to the “will of the markets.” And, oh yeah, if the government wants to build high-speed rail or housing (etc etc) then the government should get out of its own damn way and make it can actually fulfill those promises.
I pretty enthusiastically agree with all of these points. We ought to rebuild administrative capacity and get back into having government make governance decisions. Government ought to be both proactive and responsive. And often the best way to make a better future possible is to devote public money towards promoting public goods.
I also quite like several of the people operating under that banner, and quite like some of their ideas as well. (Specifically: government should fund more things, we should have more administrative capacity, and the accretion of procedural checks-with-no-balance has had plenty of regrettable consequences.)
And hey, they’re having a moment. Good for them.The term is rapidly becoming an empty signifier, though. Tesla’s new master plan boasts of “sustainable abundance.” The Silicon Valley variant of the abundance agenda is just warmed-over techno-optimism — less “let’s rebuild the administrative state and make government work again!” and more “the government should hand big sacks of money to tech startups and exempt them from taxes and regulations. Let our genius builders build!”
The Abundance 2025 conference [happened] in DC [last] week, and the speakers range from pro-housing YIMBYs to a guy arguing for “deportation abundance.”
Yikes.
Steve Teles has taken a good-faith shot at sorting through the mess:
It would not be hard to conclude that the emergence of these various flavors of abundance betrays the inherent squishiness and incoherence of the concept. And it is true that abundance is not a systematic ideology attached to a specific political coalition, as are conservatism or democratic socialism. But that doesn’t mean that it is ideological vaporware. As someone who has been working on many of these ideas for a decade or more, I think it is time to nail down just what sort of idea abundance is.
Abundance stirs confusion in part because, unlike contemporary conservatism and progressivism, it is not an idea that emerged to justify a specific party-political, coalitional, material, or cultural project. Given that abundance has been embraced by post-colonial socialists, techno-futurist capitalists, and Democratic centrists, it is best conceptualized as an alternative dimension that cuts across existing ideologies without entirely superseding them, defined by a new set of problems and tools for addressing them.
Abundance is fundamentally “syncretic,” spreading by attaching itself to a variety of different cultural practices and political projects, rather than by preserving its doctrinal purity.
He goes on to define the central unifying idea:
At its base, Abundance is best understood as having one central aspiration that requires tackling two interlocking challenges. The aspiration is to escape from a political economy defined by artificial scarcity, to create a world in which we solve problems primarily by unlocking supply.
That’s it. That’s the whole thing. Abundance says “we should solve problems by creating more,” and invites the competing political coalitions to draw their own conclusions on what constitutes a problem. (And, also, more of what, exactly?)
Syncretic terms like this run the risk of falling apart though. If DOGE is part of the Abundance movement, and the people DOGE is illegally firing is also part of the Abundance movement… If the Green New Deal is Abundance but oh hey also the Claremont Institute is Abundance too, then Abundance ceases to mean anything at all. The term is already washed.
(Q: Are Curtis Yarvin, Balaji Srinivasan, and the other Network State neomonarchists part of the Abundance movement? A: yes, that’s “dark abundance.”)
I can empathize with the instinct to try to build the broadest possible coalition. I can see why making your new “movement” seem like the one big cross-partisan idea right now feels like a win. But it is a temporary, pyrrhic victory.
Strategy is a verb. The act of strategizing involves making choices that help you accomplish goals and wield power. The Abundance movement does not appear to be making any choices whatsoever. That’s the fast track to irrelevance.
Just saying, if *I* was part of the Abundance movement, I would be cautioning people that it sure would be nice to accomplish something, anything at all, before the idea gets entirely co-opted and loses all meaning. If the Abundance folks insist on advancing a syncretic proposal so broad that it pointedly has nothing to say about what problems ought to be solved, then they are quickly going to find that their clever-new-phrase means nothing at all.
The fate of every successful political movement is that they eventually face co-optation and counteraction. But usually you want to rack up some actual victories before it happens…
“What *Isn’t* Abundance?” from @davekarpf.bsky.social (in his valuable newsletter, The Future, Now and Then).
See also: “Varieties of Abundance” from @niskanencenter.bsky.social, and “How to Blow Up a Planet” from @nybooks.com.
[Edit: late add of a piece from the ever-insightful Rusty Foster that dropped just after this was first posted: “Abundance of What.”]
* Euripides
###
As we muse on more, we might send abundant bountiful greetings to William Bligh; he was born on this date in 1754. A British naval officer, over a 50 year career, he rose to the rank of Vice-Admiral and served as colonial governor of New South Wales. But he is remembered for his role in the most famous mutiny in history: in 1879, the first officer and crew “removed” Bligh from his command of (and set him and his few supporters adrift from) HMAV Bounty.
“Whoever wishes to foresee the future must consult the past; for human events ever resemble those of preceding times”*…
In times like these, perspective is at a premium. Here, Derek Thompson on what we might learn from our not-so-terribly-distant past…
When we hear about technological change and social crisis in the 21st century, it is easy to imagine that we are living through a special period of history. But many eras have grappled with the problems that seem to uniquely plague our own. The beginning of the 20th century was a period of speed and technological splendor (the automobile! the airplane! the bicycle!), shattered nerves, mass anxiety, and a widespread sense that the world had been forever knocked off its historical axis: a familiar stew of ideas. I think we can learn a lot about the present by studying historical periods whose challenges rhyme with our own.
My favorite period of history is the 30- to 40-year span between the end of the 19th century and the early innings of the 20th century. It was an era of incredible change. From Abundance (which Thompson co-authored with Ezra Klein):
Imagine going to sleep in 1875 in New York City and waking up thirty years later. As you shut your eyes, there is no electric lighting, Coca-Cola, basketball, or aspirin. There are no cars or “sneakers.” The tallest building in Manhattan is a church.
When you wake up in 1905, the city has been remade with towering steel-skeleton buildings called “skyscrapers.” The streets are filled with novelty: automobiles powered by new internal combustion engines, people riding bicycles in rubber-soled shoes—all recent innovations. The Sears catalog, the cardboard box, and aspirin are new arrivals. People have enjoyed their first sip of Coca-Cola and their first bite of what we now call an American hamburger. The Wright brothers have flown the first airplane. When you passed into slumber, nobody had taken a picture with a Kodak camera or used a machine that made motion pictures, or bought a device to play recorded music. By 1905, we have the first commercial versions of all three—the simple box camera, the cinematograph, and the phonograph.
No book on turn-of-the-century history has influenced me more, or brought me more joy, than The Vertigo Years: Europe 1900-1914 by Philipp Blom. I think it might be the most underrated history book ever written. In my favorite chapters focusing on the years around 1910, Blom describes how turn-of-the-century technology changed the way people thought about art and human nature and how it contributed to a nervous breakdown across the west. Disoriented by the speed of modern times, Europeans and Americans suffered from record-high rates of anxiety and a sense that our inventions had destroyed our humanity. Meanwhile, some artists channeled this disorientation to create some of the greatest art of all time.
[Thompson uses passages from Blom to unpack those issues– a world moving too fast, the anxiety occasioned by technological change, and the responses of artists and creators of culture. He concludes with a consideration of two influential new theories of human nature that arose at that point…]
… Blom closes his chapter “1910: Human Nature Changed” by considering two intellectual giants of the time: the sociologist Max Weber and the psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, whose International Psychoanalytic Association was founded in 1910. The tension between their theories of human nature are profoundly relevant today.
In his famous work The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Weber, a German sociologist, argued that certain Protestant—especially Calvinist—traditions supported habits that aligned with the development of modern capitalism. He argued that the Protestant tradition of northern European worshippers cultivated a disciplined approach to work, savings, and investment that proved valuable in commerce, while the Calvinist doctrine of divine grace “could lead believers to read worldly success as a possible sign of God’s favor,” as Blom summarizes. Weber believed that Protestantism not only encouraged followers to pour their energies into labor (hence the allusion to Work Ethic in the book’s title) but also helped create a culture of trade and investment that supported the rise of modern capitalism.
“It is easy to see how Freud’s analysis follows on from Weber’s,” Blom writes. To Freud, human nature was at risk of being fully dissolved by capitalism and modern society, like chalk dropped in acid. Beneath the polite masks demanded by modern society, he said, there lurked a more atavistic and instinctual self. Freud saw our psyche as a tug-of-war between the id (our animal urges) and superego (the voice in our head that internalizes society’s rules), with the ego stuck in the middle trying to negotiate an authentic identity in the face of mass inauthenticity. One of Freud’s most fantastic insights was that some people can channel or redirect their most raw and unacceptable urges toward productive and acceptable work. His name for this bit of psychological alchemy was sublimation.
Modern capitalism, in Freudian terms, was the sublimation of self-interest—or, one might even say, the sublimation of greed. “The suppression of natural urges is a necessary precondition for capitalist success,” Blom writes in summary, “but while it is productive for the group and its wealth, such an approach will eventually exact its revenge on the individual.” By this interpretation, the mass anxiety of the early 1900s—whether you call it neurasthenia, American Nervousness, or Newyorkitis—was price of modernity, technological development, and even capitalism itself.
There is little evidence that Freud and Weber ever debated one another. Yet when you set their theories side by side, it’s hard not to hear a conversation that still shapes much modern commentary. Weber wrote that modern capitalism evolved from religious doctrines that fit our nature, while Freud argued that human nature is unfit for a modern world that distorts and represses our basic urges. Are our most impressive inventions the ultimate expression of our humanity, or are they the ultimate threat to it? This is the question that every generation must answer for itself, including our own. It is a question equally worthy of the automobile and artificial intelligence. The troubling answer—for Weber and for Freud; for 1910 and for 2025—is: perhaps, both.
Learning from our past: “1910: The Year the Modern World Lost Its Mind,” from @dkthomp.bsky.social. Eminently worth reading in full.
Pair with another “history lesson,” a consideration of American mechanisms of voter restriction/suppression over the years (as context for the current application of the Orban playbook by the Trump Administration and states like Texas: “Competitive authoritarianism” and America’s slide toward it.” moves fueled by appeals to the very anxieties (and to false nostalgia for times that were free of it) discussed above.
* Machiavelli
###
As we look back to look forward, we might send altitudinous birthday greetings to a man whose work figured into the tale that Thompson and Blom tell: Orville Wright; he was born on this date in 1871. An inventor and aviator, he American inventor and aviator, he invented, with his elder brother Wilbur, the first powered airplane, Flyer, capable of sustained, controlled flight. In 1903, at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, Orville made the first ever manned powered flight, airborn for 12 sec. By 1905, the brothers had improved the design, built and and made several long flights in Flyer III, which was the first fully practical airplane, able to fly up to 38-min and travel 24 miles (though not without incident). Their Model A was produced later in 1908, capable of over two hours of flight. By 1909 their flights were the subject of wide public interest, watched by leaders (like President Taft) and by public crowds of as many as a million people (in Manhattan during the Hudson-Fulton Celebration in New York City)… by 1910, flight and its future had become one of the many accelerating vectors driving the turmoil that THompson describes.
“I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking… Some day, all this will have to be developed, carefully printed, fixed.”*
How do we make sense of the world? How do we make our ways through it? Venkatesh Rao cautions against both of the currently-dominant narratives that shape our perceptions and actions: the “helpless witness,” as evinced in the quote above, and the other dominant lens, the “blind builder”…
It is hard to make sense of events these days because we feel constantly forced into a false choice between blind builder narratives and helpless witness narratives. Stories told by people so enthralled by new agencies they don’t notice their insensibility to current realities, or the poverty of their future visions driving their excited building. Or stories told by people so lacking in agency of any sort that their visions, while richer, are uniformly bleak and framed by their own sense of utter helplessness and doom.
The fundamental inadequacies of these frames, much more than the right/left political leanings usually associated with them, is perhaps the real reason for my refusal to ally with any of the narratives on offer. I don’t want to be either blind or helpless, or move along a tradeoff curve between them.
An interesting pattern that’s popped for me as a way out of this bind, and a possible stance from which to narrate and inhabit more powerful sorts of stories, is working with media that are simultaneously about seeing and doing...
Eminently worth reading in full: “Not Just a Camera, Not Just an Engine,” from @vgr.bsky.social.
* Christopher Isherwood, “Goodbye to Berlin” (in The Berlin Stories)
###
As we reframe, we might recall that, on this date in 1872, Susan B. Anthony was fined $100 for voting.
In 1863, she and Elizabeth Cady Stanton had founded the Women’s Loyal National League. In 1866, the pair initiated the American Equal Rights Association which campaigned for equal rights for both African Americans and all women. In 1869, they created the National Woman Suffrage Association and on this day in 1872, Anthony attempted to vote in her hometown of Rochester, New York– and was fined $100 for doing so. She refused to pay the fine and the authorities declined to take further action against her. In 1878, Anthony and Stanton presented Congress with an amendment giving women the right to vote. It became the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution in 1920. In 1979, the United States honored Anthony by placing her image on the one-dollar U.S. coin.
“The purpose of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution is to destroy the old culture. You cannot stop us!”*…
… or perhaps (per the title quote above), China in the late 60s and early 70s.
Ryan Broderick, with thoughts on reactions to the recent assassination of United Healthcare’s CEO…
Last week, the CEO of UnitedHealthcare, Brian Thompson, was gunned down by an unknown suspect outside of a Manhattan hotel as he was headed to an investor’s meeting. The New York Police Department is now carrying out a manhunt to find the gunman, who is still at large. Authorities released four, unfortunately, dazzling photos of Thompson’s seemingly very handsome masked killer, revealed that his shell casings had the words “deny,” “defend,” and “depose” carved on them, and, also, found a backpack full of Monopoly money believed to belong to the suspect. Oh, also, the hospital Thompson was sent to after the shooting wasn’t in UnitedHealthcare’s network. All of this has only added to the social media frenzy around the murder.
In fact, the overwhelming response to Thompson’s death online could be summed up as “lol, lmao even.” But it, should be noted, that it’s not just chronically online shitposters celebrating Thompson’s death. It’s possible this is the most aligned America — well, aside from the folks in its highest tax brackets — has been about a news story since the invention of the internet.
An announcement on Facebook from UnitedHealthcare had to have reaction counts turned off because of the amount of laughing emojis users were adding to it. Right-wing pundit Ben Shapiro’s viewers were breaking rank in the comments underneath a video of his about the killing. Reddit moderators couldn’t contain a thread about it on r/medicine. There was a lookalike contest for Thompson’s killer in Washington Square Park over the weekend. There’s a ton of merch with “deny,” “defend,” and “depose” popping up. And there are even some fun conspiracy theories…
… Reporter Taylor Lorenz went long over in User Mag about about how, no, this does not mean that an overwhelming amount of the country is pro-murder, or whatever. “Thousands of Americans (myself included) are fed up with our barbaric healthcare system and the people at the top who rake in millions while inflicting pain, suffering, and death on millions of innocent people,” she wrote. And Today In Tabs’ Rusty Foster put it another way, writing, “A nation full of people absolutely parched for consequences and with nothing to look forward to but rising fascism.”
The only recent story like this that you can really point to is the assassination of Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe in 2022. His killer revealed that he carried out the attack because of Abe’s support of the Unification Church, a cult-like religious order that wields a tremendous amount of political influence in Japan. And the overwhelming response from both the Japanese public and lawmakers, alike, was, yeah, actually, he had a point. I don’t think Thompson’s murder is suddenly going to lead to the dismantling of America’s cruel and inhumane healthcare industry, but it’s certainly been a cathartic few days online.
It has also quickly unraveled a decade-plus of right-wing programming in online spaces for young men. Many of whom are suddenly realizing maybe there are meatier subjects to take their anger out on than the racial makeup of Star Wars casting announcements. The best example being a thread yesterday on the subreddit for the edgelord streamer Asmongold, where users were enthusiastically talking about giving up the culture war to focus on a “class war”. The thread was deleted eventually for being “political,” but the same conversations are happening all over the manosphere right now. Which, you know, I don’t think anyone had an anonymous assassin on their list of possible “Leftist Joe Rogan’s,” but it seems like he’s moved to the head of the pack.
As Bluesky user hayao.lol wrote, “However this ends up [as of this writing, authorities have detained “a person of interest”] the guy won, flat out. This has done more damage to the image of the surveillance state, public complacency around healthcare, and ‘cops’ as a concept than any other single act.” Which I suspect is what’s actually making US elites so uncomfortable about all of this.
Thompson’s death [has] been a real shock to the system for America’s ruling class, who seem to be realizing for the first time that the majority of the country will not mourn their deaths. As podcaster and reporter Michael Hobbes wrote a few years ago, “I think we’ll look back on the last decade as a time when social media gave previously marginalized groups the ability to speak directly to elites and, as a result, elites lost their minds.” Which is why a whole bunch of tedious hall monitors are suddenly tut-tutting about all the memes in every major newspaper. I, personally, am not going super hard on the pro-assassination memes — as funny as they are — because we just don’t know what the motive was. We live in a time of mass accelerationist violence and I don’t feel like publicly cheerleading a guy who might have a compound full of deranged far-right ramblings. But I’m also not stupid enough to think that scolding the entire internet for how they’re acting is a meaningful use of my time on planet Earth. Maybe if I had a paid column somewhere — or proper health insurance — I’d feel different…
History suggests that when a political/economic system needs reset, but those who control it resist, the consequence can be an explosive period of painful brutality… that’s to say, “brutal” in that it is too often too bloody, and “brute” in that it is a blunt instrument, inflicting pain and damage much more broadly than just on its ostensible targets… a period of chaos too often followed by an autocracy (a la Napoleon in France and CCP one-party rule in China). The only way to avoid such an explosion is to begin making the changes that can alleviate pressure– to address the real needs of those whose suffering is fueling their growing anger– before that pressure destroys the system entirely.
Fix it, or it fails completely… and quite possibly catastrophically.
Learning from tragedy– on the warning shot that killed the United Healthcare CEO: Trying to scold the entire internet,” from @ryanhatesthis.bsky.social.
See– do see– also: “Radicalized,” from Cory Doctorow
* An unnamed Red Guard, 1966
###
As we contemplate consequences, we might recall that it was on this date in 1915 that Chinese president Yuan Shikai proclaimed the Empire of China (AKA the Hongxian Monarchy), an attempt to reinstate the monarchy in China, with himself as emperor. His reign was short-lived: a civil war broke out 10 days later; in March of 1916, Yuan “abdicated,” and the republic was restored. The republican cause was set back by several years, and China entered into a period of fracture and conflict among a number of local warlords.
“All history must be mobilized if one would understand the present”*…
… especially, one might conclude, when it comes to understanding civilizational challenges like climate change. But as Deborah Coen explains, that’s not so straightforward…
Never before in human history has Earth experienced a change in climate as rapid as the shift we’re living through today. Can history hold clues to an upheaval without precedent? That depends on how we frame the question. Scientists tend to have two questions. They want to know how past societies have been impacted by less dramatic episodes of climate variability, and they want to know what has motivated societies to switch from one fuel source to another. Over the past 20 years, historians’ answers have influenced the reports of major international scientific bodies, including the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the Anthropocene Working Group of the International Union of Geological Sciences. And yet, following the lead of scientists has constrained how climate historians think about drivers of change. Scientists like to think that change comes from bold new theories and technological breakthroughs. The chemist Paul Crutzen, for instance, popularized the term “Anthropocene” in part to underscore his faith that the solution to the environmental crisis would come from human ingenuity. Today, scientists seek funding for massive projects, from shoring up a melting glacier to constructing climate research centers on the scale of the Manhattan Project. In this spirit, climate historians have tended to tell dramatic stories in which societies fail or succeed according to their ability to impose top-down change. What these accounts miss are the humble drivers of change that unfold at the scale of everyday life and grow bottom-up rather than top-down. Indeed, a third question is emerging for historians today: what small-scale mechanisms might trigger a transition to a more equitable and sustainable future?…
…
The appeal of both historical frameworks—collapse and resilience—lies ultimately in their framing of human societies as complex systems that can be modeled much like other components of the “Earth system.” In this respect, historians have dutifully answered the question posed by scientists, and they have done so in scientists’ terms. They have thereby made it possible to integrate the human factor into the models that scientists use to study and predict global change. As one 2018 paper put it, “the idea of building a forecasting engine for societal breakdown is too tempting to resist.”
Such “integrated assessment models,” which incorporate demographic and economic trajectories into forecasts of environmental change, gained currency in the 1990s with the rise of international diplomacy around global warming. The models raised the second thorny question mentioned above: How do energy transitions unfold? What motivates a society to replace one fuel source with another?
Again, the framing of the question conditioned the answers. Implicit is the assumption that human history has inevitably marched towards increasingly energy-dense fuel sources. With the onset of industrialization, animal power, wind power, and waterpower were replaced by coal and peat, which in turn gave way to gas and oil. The task of the historian became a narrow search for the factors that induced a fuel switch in the past—and which, by extension, might motivate a transition to “clean” energy in the future…
…
Morris and McNeill [Ian Morris’s 2015 Foragers, Farmers, and Fossil Fuels: How Human Values Evolve and J. R. McNeill’s Something New Under the Sun: An Environmental History of the Twentieth-Century World] gave the scientists what they were looking for: a universal, quantitative version of human history. And yet, these historians obscured what I would call the most important feature of history: contingency. The problem stems, first, from their reliance on historical sources—such as bureaucratic records and monumental remains—that tell history from the point of view of states and their elites. Secondly, these histories constrain their field of view by adopting the language of science and policy. The very concept of “sustainability,” much like its partner, “development,” implies that the goal is to continue along the path that got us here. Reading Morris and McNeill, it is hard even to imagine what an alternative would look like—let alone how we could bring it about.
Fortunately, other historians have shown us that the course of industrialization was by no means inevitable. Energy transitions did not go unchallenged. Recent histories of coal mining (Victor Seow, Thomas G. Andrews) and fracking (Conevery Valencius) reveal that ordinary people objected to the extraction of these fuels due to the risks they posed to local communities. Dismissing past critics as shortsighted or irrational misses the point: history could have gone differently…
…
David Graeber and David Wengrow build on Scott’s insights [James Scott’s Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States] in their monumental synthesis, The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity (2021). They argue that what has looked to archaeologists like the remains of collapsed early states might be evidence of a conscious decision to abandon the experiment. In sharp contrast to the inevitability of the evolutionist narrative, Graeber and Wengrow stress that humans have repeatedly exercised their freedom to opt out of hierarchical societies and live otherwise. Their message: We might do the same. Our values need not be dictated by the economic choices made by our forebears…
… Morris’s critical review of The Dawn of Everything claims that its attention to exceptions cannot disprove his model. Well then, what can? For a scholar so concerned with scientific credibility, Morris is remarkably unconcerned that his theory fails to pass Popper’s falsifiability test. He closes his review by chiding the authors for their utopianism: “It would be uplifting to think that whatever we dislike about our own age only persists because we have hitherto lacked the imagination and courage to put something better in its place.” One has to wonder: who is this “we” who lacks imagination and courage? Clearly, Morris has missed their point. “Something better” has been put in place again and again, flourishing at smaller or larger scales throughout human history.
Environmental historians Ian Jared Miller and Paul Warde diagnose the problem this way: “Purely quantitative or global approaches to energy” tend to overlook the experiences of those who are not making the decisions but whose lives are affected by them. This oversight is a result of methods that make it “difficult to grasp everyday experience as a prompt to action and an agent of change.” Otherwise put, historians miss a great deal when they rely on the quantitative tools of scientists.
History will never provide a crystal ball, and that’s not what we should ask of it. Nor should we be limited by theories of historical change that consider “events” only as unusual occurrences that were recognized as such by contemporaries. Change can also be the result of an accumulation of small disruptions that goes unnoticed by mainstream observers. Climate historians know this well, since the variability they study was often unremarked upon by those living through it. And yet, climate historians have taken little interest in processes of change that run bottom-up rather than top-down.
This is why climate historians have much to learn from historians of disenfranchised populations…
These histories show that human feelings and values are not dictated by the economic system in which we happen to find ourselves. On the contrary, emotions are unruly and uncontainable; they cannot be quantified and will never serve as input for Earth system models. They can, however, point towards alternative ways of living and relating. Where those alternatives lead, no one can know. But the very fact that human relations are emergent and unpredictable is grounds for hope.
Eminently worth reading in full: “What’s Next for Histories of Climate Change,” from @LAReviewofBooks.
* Fernand Braudel
###
As we include, we might send grateful birthday greetings to a historian with a different focus, but that same urge to inclusion– Alan Lomax; he was born on this date in 1915. A historian, folklorist, musician, and ethnomusicologist, he collected, archived, and distributed recordings of vernacular American music that would surely have otherwise been lost.
The many, many artists Lomax is credited with discovering and bringing to a wider audience include blues guitarist Robert Johnson, protest singer Woody Guthrie, folk artist Pete Seeger, country musician Burl Ives, Scottish Gaelic singer Flora MacNeil, and country blues singers Lead Belly and Muddy Waters. Lomax recorded thousands of songs and interviews for the Archive of American Folk Song (of which he was the director) at the Library of Congress; and he produced recordings, concerts, and radio shows in the US and in England, which played an important role in preserving folk music traditions in both countries and helped start both the American and British folk revivals of the 1940s, 1950s, and early 1960s.
You must be logged in to post a comment.