Posts Tagged ‘values’
“The Times They Are A-Changin'”*…
Further to an earlier post in his wonderful newsletter The Honest Broker, Ted Gioia offers a provocative (and for your correspondent’s money, ultimately optimistic) forecast…
Would you believe me if I told you that the biggest news story of our century is happening right now—but is never mentioned in the press?
That sounds crazy, doesn’t it?
But that is often the case when a bold new worldview appears.
The biggest changes often happen long before they even get a name. By the time the scribes notice, the world is already reborn.
- How long did it take before the Renaissance got mentioned in the town square?
- When did newspapers start covering the Enlightenment?
- Or the collapse in mercantilism?
- Or the rise of globalism?
- Or the birth of Christianity or Islam or some other earthshaking creed?
You can take this to the bank: If the New York Times notices the Buddha, the enlightened one has already left town.
For example, the word Renaissance got introduced two hundred years after the start of the Renaissance. The game was already over.
The same is true of most major cultural movements—they are truly the elephants in the room. And the elites at the epicenter of power are absolutely the last to notice.
Tiberius may run the entire Roman Empire, but he will never hear the Good News.
There’s a general rule here—the bigger the shift, the easier it is to miss.
We are living through a situation like that right now. We are experiencing a total shift—like the magnetic poles reversing. But it doesn’t even have a name—not yet.
So let’s give it one.
Let’s call it: The Collapse of the Knowledge System.
We could also define it as the emergence of a new knowledge system.
In this regard, it resembles other massive shifts in Western history—specifically the rebirth of humanistic thinking in the early Renaissance, or the rise of Romanticism in the nineteenth century.
In these volatile situations, the whole entrenched hierarchy of truth and authority gets totally reversed. The old experts and their systems are discredited, and completely new values take their place. The newcomers bring more than just a new attitude—they turn everything on its head.
That’s happening right now…
[Gioia unpacks ten signs of this collapse…]
… Why isn’t this discussed openly—in media, in universities, in public discourse? Everything I’ve mentioned above is public knowledge. So why aren’t the experts discussing it?
Well, that’s obvious.
The experts don’t want to admit this is happening because it puts their status at risk. And the same is true of all the organizations and businesses that own and control the knowledge system.
The last thing they want is to call attention to the breakdown.
So they can only address the situation in isolated, disconnected ways. Admitting that these ten symptoms are part of a larger, systemic problem can’t be acknowledged—not under any circumstances.
And that’s why we can’t assume that any quick fix—from politicians or universities—will reverse this decline. We are beyond that stage.
The more important question is this: When the old knowledge hierarchy collapses, what will replace it?
Yes, something will replace it. And I’ve hinted at that in previous articles here—for example, my “Notes Toward a New Romanticism.”
Even as tech gets degrades, people will still need something solid and reliable that will contribute to human flourishing. In fact, they will need that more than ever.
If they can’t get it from Silicon Valley, they will find it elsewhere.
But where?
Let me point out that despite all the manipulations, hallucinations, abuses, and dysfunctional excesses of the digital life…
…Despite all of these, symphonies sound as majestic as ever. Philosophy is more necessary than ever. Paintings are still glorious. Great architecture does not collapse. Nature warms the heart. As do poems and epics and myths.
Jazz still swings. Heroes still prevail. The soul is stirred. And one lover still reaches for another.
I’m not sure what exactly will replace the cold, dying knowledge system. But I suspect it will recognize the value of these things. And will prevail for that very reason…
… before closing, let me make a few more points
- Science and tech will not disappear. But they will face an intense backlash beyond anything we’ve experienced in the last 200 years.
- The people running the tech world fail to grasp this. They think that the next big stage is the Singularity—when everybody lets the technocracy control everything and make every decision. In fact, the exact opposite is about to unfold.
- I’m not suggesting that you can replace tech with a poem or symphony. But tech now desperately needs what can only be provided by the humanities and human values.
- The new knowledge system will be built on these human values. Technology will be forced to serve it—or it will get locked into a losing battle with the new “softer and gentler” knowledge system…
A huge change is coming: “The Ten Warning Signs,” from @tedgioia.bsky.social.
* Bob Dylan
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As we wonder about ways of knowing, we might recall that it was on this date in 1983 that the Kinks released their 20th studio album, State of Confusion. (The LP features the single “Come Dancing“, which hit number 6 on the Billboard Hot 100 and was one of the band’s biggest hit singles in the United States, equaling the 1965 peak of “Tired of Waiting for You.” The album itself was a major success, peaking at number 12 on the Billboard albums chart.)
“The ultimate hidden truth of the world is that it is something we make and could just as easily make differently”*…
As a new collection of his writing is published, Rebecca Solnit remembers her friend David Graeber, the late activist and anarchist who believed ordinary people have the power to change the world…
David Graeber was a joyful, celebratory person. An enthusiast, voluble, on fire with the possibilities in the ideas and ideologies he wrestled with. Every time we met – from New Haven in the early 00s to London a few years before his death in 2020 – he was essentially the same: beaming, rumpled, with a restless energy that seemed to echo the constant motion of his mind, words tumbling out as though they were, in their unstoppable abundance, overflowing. But he was also much respected in activist circles for being a good listener, and his radical egalitarianism was borne out in how he related to the people around him.
He was always an anthropologist. After doing fieldwork among traditional peoples in Madagascar, he just never stopped, but he turned his focus to his own society. Essays such as Dead Zones of the Imagination: On Violence, Bureaucracy, and ‘Interpretive Labor’ and his book Bullshit Jobs came from using the equipment of an anthropologist on stuff usually regarded as boring, or not regarded at all – the function and impact of bureaucracy. His 2011 bestseller on debt reminded us that money and finance are among the social arrangements that could be rearranged for the better.
He insisted, again and again, that industrialised Euro-American civilisation was, like other societies past and present, only one way of doing things among countless options. He cited times when societies rejected agriculture or technology or social hierarchy, when social groups chose what has often been dismissed as primitive because it was more free. And he rejected all the linear narratives that present contemporary human beings as declining from primordial innocence or ascending from primitive barbarism. He offered, in place of a single narrative, many versions and variations; a vision of societies as ongoing experiments, and human beings as endlessly creative. That variety was a source of hope for him, a basis for his recurrent insistence that it doesn’t have to be this way.
As Marcus Rediker wrote in his review of David’s posthumous book Pirate Enlightenment, “Everything Graeber wrote was simultaneously a genealogy of the present and an account of what a just society might look like.” He was concerned about inequality of all kinds, including gender inequality in this society and others, and the violence that enforces inequality and unfreedom, as well as how they might be delegitimised and where and when societies might have escaped them. He focused, in short, on freedom and its impediments…
…
… The way that, as he wrote, “The ultimate hidden truth of the world is that it is something we make and could just as easily make differently.” If you truly believe that, if you perceive a world that is constructed according to certain assumptions and values, then you see that it can be changed, not least by changing those assumptions and values.
We have to recognise that ideas are tools that we wield – and with them, some power. David wanted to put these tools in everyone’s hands, or remind them that they are already there. Which is part of why he worked hard at – and succeeded in – writing in a style that wasn’t always simple but was always as clear and accessible as possible, given the material. Egalitarianism is a prose style, too. Our mutual friend the writer, film-maker, and debt abolitionist Astra Taylor texted him: “Re-reading Debt. You are such a damn good writer. A rare skill among lefties.” He texted back that August, a month before his demise: “Why thanks! Well at least I take care to do so – I call it ‘being nice to the reader,’ which is an extension of the politics, in a sense.”
In order to believe that people can govern themselves in the absence of coercive institutions and hierarchies, anarchists must have great faith in ordinary people, and David did. A sentence Lyndsey Stonebridge wrote about Hannah Arendt could apply equally well to him: “To fixate on her exceptional mind is to miss something that is important about her lessons in thinking: thinking is ordinary, she teaches; that is its secret power.”…
An edited extract from Solnit’s foreword to The Ultimate Hidden Truth of the World by David Graeber: “‘It does not have to be this way’- the radical optimism of David Graeber,” from @RebeccaSolnit in @guardian.
* David Graeber
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As we promote possibility (and remember that on this date in 1973 then-President Richard Nixon averred in a speech that “I am not a crook”), we might send never-ending birthday greetings to August Möbius; he was born on this date in 1790. An astronomer and mathematician, he studied under mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss while Gauss was the director of the Göttingen Observatory. From there, he went on to study with Carl Gauss’s instructor, Johann Pfaff, at the University of Halle, where he completed his doctoral thesis The occultation of fixed stars in 1815. In 1816, he became Extraordinary Professor in the “chair of astronomy and higher mechanics” at the University of Leipzig, where he remained for the rest of his career.
While he was an influential professor, he is best remembered for his creation of the “Möbius strip.”
“The young, no doubt, make mistakes; but the old, when they try to think for them, make even greater mistakes.”*…
Every Sunday Bruce Mehlman, a Washington insider (a “government relations consultant”) publishes “Six Chart Sunday” in his newsletter, Age of Disruption. They’re always fascinating and informative; this week’s was especially striking.
The chart above and five others, each with brief explanatory summaries, tell the tale of wide “Generation Gaps.”
As Victor Klemperer observed, “A generation has more in common, after all, than a nation, than a profession.”
* Bertrand Russell, Mortals and Others: American Essays 1931-35
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As we mind the gap, we might recall that it was on this date in 1971 that the Rolling Stones’ Sticky Fingers hit #1 on the U.S. album chart (their second chart-topping album). A critical and popular success, it is also remembered for its cover (conceived by Andy Warhol and photographed and designed by members of his art collective, the Factory, featuring a zippable image of a man’s jeans) and for its introduction of the now ubiquitous tongue and lips logo.
“And these children that you spit on / “As they try to change their worlds / Are immune to your consultations. / They’re quite aware of what they’re going through.”*…
From our friends at The Pudding— specifically, from Alvin Chang— a thorough (and illuminating and bracing) look at how the conditions in which our young are raised have everything to do with how their lives unfold…
In this story, we’ll follow hundreds of teenagers for the next 24 years, when they’ll be in their late-30s. They’re among the thousands of kids who are part of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth. This means researchers have followed them since their teenage years to the present day – and beyond.
As Matt Muir observes in his invaluable Web Curios…
… Very North America-centric in terms of the data it’s drawing on, but wherever you are in the world the themes that it speaks to will apply – drawing on data about the life experiences of young people tracked by US statisticians….
As you scroll you see visual representations of the proportion of kids in each agegroup coterie who will experience ‘significant’ life events, from crime to poverty and beyond, and how those life events will go on to impact their academic prospects and, eventually, their life prospects – none of this should be surprising, but it’s a hugely-effective way of communicating the long-term impacts of relatively small differences in early-stage life across a demographic swathe…
Data visualization at its best and most compelling: “This Is a Teenager,” from @alv9n in @puddingviz via @Matt_Muir.
* David Bowie, “Changes”
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As we analyze adolescence, we might recall that it was on this date in 1961 that the Cleftones, a group of teens who had formed a vocal group a 3 years earlier in high school, released “Heart and Soul” (a rearrangement of the 1938 standard); it reached #18 on the pop chart and #10 on the R&B chart and was later used in the 1973 movie American Graffiti.
Then fifteen-year-old Duane Hitchings, who went on to win a Grammy award for his work on the Flashdance soundtrack in 1984, played keyboards on the track– his first professional gig. In an interview with Rock United, he recalls that the recording session was cut short when singer Pat Spann, who was dating drummer Panama Francis, was caught in a compromising position with the guitarist. “That ended the session. So the last track we recorded was the record.”
“Your values become your destiny”*…
… and that could be an issue for the global order. People’s principles were expected to align as countries got richer; research suggests that instead they’re diverging. What happened?…
In 1981 over 40% of the world’s population lived in extreme poverty. But economic growth was starting to accelerate in developing countries. And Ron Inglehart, a professor at the University of Michigan, was organising a worldwide survey team to test the theory that, as peasant farmers escape poverty, they begin to think and behave differently, as people in the past had done when they joined the middle classes.
They might give a higher priority to education, to widening their children’s knowledge, than their own parents had done. They might give greater weight to their own experience and reasoning, and less to religious books or the authority of kings. And perhaps these new ways, these basic values, would begin to converge around the world. Such matters, Inglehart thought, could be tested by asking questions which revealed underlying values such as “How important is religion in your life?”, “Would you be happy living next to a foreigner?” and “Can you trust most people?”
Forty years later, only 8% of the world’s population is still in extreme poverty; more than half, on some measures, count as middle class. The World Values Survey (WVS), Inglehart’s baby, has become the world’s biggest social-research network. Every five years or so its researchers sally out into the field interviewing, at last count, almost 130,000 people in 90 countries. Yet its latest wave of results, which covers 2017-22, provides only partial endorsement of the idea that basic values tend to converge as people get richer. In significant ways, the differences between how people think in different parts of the world seem to be widening.
The Economist unpacks the data (with loads of helpful graphics), examines the possible causes at work, and looks to the future: “Western values are steadily diverging from the rest of the world’s” @TheEconomist.
* Gandhi
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As we contemplate culture, we might send carefully-observed birthday greetings to John Scott CBE FRSA FBA FAcSS; he was born on this date in 1949. A sociologist, he is best known for his work on economic and social networks, perhaps especially The Sage Handbook of Social Network Analysis and Conceptualising the Social World.
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