Changes

Yesterday a reader commented that my post from Wednesday (Tectonic Plates are Shifting) sounded somewhat grim.   Although it may not always come through in my writing, I usually prefer to take an optimistic view of the world and the future.  Over all, I have been of the opinion that the forces of construction have just barely out-performed the forces of destruction and my optimism is based on the belief that this will continue and accelerate.  Yet, times of rapid change, paradigm shifts, tend to be the most dangerous times.

Thomas P.M. Barnett, with his view that connectivity is the best resolution to the tension between the gap and the core, is an excellent source for support of one's optimism.  Yesterday he talked about Afghanistan as as example of The internal front in the Long War:

That's the enemy we fight in the Long War: someone who rams a missile into a school full of kids from their own society:

....

One teacher summed it up nicely: "If our people do not get educated, it will be a disaster for our country. We see how far ahead other countries are getting, and we are just falling behind."

Interestingly, today he points to the internal front in the long war in America.  In Two sides of the same coin, he points to an ad in the Times asking Bush to act on Darfur followed by:

Anyway, we're told to send Prez Bush a message... I dunno... Get off your ass and start throwing some military power around!

Ah, but then you turn the page to: "The world can't wait! Drive out the Bush regime!" The accompanying graphic shows the world on fire.

Just like the Darfur page, this one implies that silence equals complicity.

So which one is it, I ask?

You want a crippled presidency to stop the killing or a strong one to start the killing necessary to stop the killing?

Essentially, Tom Barnett's argument is that the clash of the modern world and primitive cultures sets off a cascade which destabilizes the more primitive culture ands eventually reorganizes at a higher, more peaceful level.  The problem is that too many people do not react well to paradigm shifts; the resistance is always extreme (witness how Galileo was threatened with excommunication for suggesting the earth is not the center of the universe), and when the people with the power and the weapons resist, the disruptions they can cause are profound.  Furthermore, there is a question whether the core can always prevail over the gap. 

In France, there is a civil war underway, though the media and the French elites have been unable to face the bitter reality.  The civil war in America has been slightly more refined, but the forces of reaction are becoming more desperate, witness Columbia University, where the battle over freedom of speech has escalated.  The behavior of the Columbia University administration is telling.  Our institutions are doing poorly, as they often do, during times of rapid and disorienting change.

Grim has a rather grim post (apologies; the opportunity was irresistible) continuing a discussion from Winds of Change about apocalyptic and millennialist thinking.  In his post, Time for a Change:, he lucidly describes how our democratic institutions are failing and furthermore, how such failure has been built in and institutionalized.  I think Grim's diagnosis is very much on target, but his treatment prescriptions fall short.  Among other things, he recommends Constitutional Amendments and new laws that are highly unlikely to be passed by the very dysfunctional institutions he so clearly describes.  Even if his suggestions were to come to fruition, there is no way these changes could be brought about in a timely fashion and time is short and as Grim points out:

In this way, I think we can repair the institutions of our government. The strains are evident, and they are severe. Several crises looming on the horizon or already here -- Iraq, Iran, North Korea, terrorism, the budget crisis of retiring Boomers and the attending pension crisis of retiring Federal workers -- cannot be solved by the institutions in their current state.

[Grim also has an interesting, though very negative, take on the last Sanity Squad Podcast that I partially addressed in my post on PsychBlogging and the Goldwater Rule.  I think he makes some common misunderstandings about Psychology and some of what he reads but that is a topic for another post.]

Chester posts at Winds on Apocalypse Everywhere and in a way agrees with Grim.  Chester writes specifically about our Media's role in engendering the kind of existential despair that leads to Apocalyptic cum Utopian fantasies:

Perhaps an unmentioned factor is the sensational media. The press encourages a worldview that is both utopian and cynical at the same time: utopian for constantly using hindsight to espouse an "if-only" no-place that can never truly exist. At the same time, cynical, for finding the flaws in all who would aspire to leadership of any kind -- no matter how trifling or inconsequential they might be, they are all too frequently allowed to define the man behind the image....

What does this have to do with a preponderance of apocalyptic visions?

Well, if leadership as exposed in the press is perpetually vacuous; if sentiments such as heroism are routinely traded for exposes; if virtue is tossed out in favor of sanctimony or mere moralizing, then what is left?

Nothing. A nihilistic morass with no fixed points at all with which to anchor one's life. It matters not if that fixed point is a Muslim, Christian, libertarian, idealistic, or classically virtuous one. None of these will be allowed.

So why not nuke the whole thing and start over?

When you add the failure of our press, which represents our perceptual apparatus for apprehending the world beyond our immediate senses, to the mix, our troubles are compounded.  And this leads me to a question that I struggle with.

I enjoy change and love our headlong rush into the future.  I find the possibilities of nanotechnology, biotechnology, information technology, space technology, etc, much more exciting than frightening even while I recognize how disruptive such changes can be.  Yet I wonder, have we, in effect, already reached a kind of Singularity?  Has the accelerating rate of change in our world already out-paced our National and International Institutions' ability to adapt?  If so, chaotic change is likely and that favors regression, not progression.