Tweet from Elon today:
Shashank Joshi's response was, "Who can forget the moment in Star Wars where the Rebel Alliance surrounds a Holiday Inn in Rotherham and tries to murder all the migrants inside. A heartwarming moment."
Tweet from Elon today:
The Richest Man on Earth: "I'm a scrappy underdog!"
ReplyDelete"Question: how much this kind of political fantasy matter? Do the people who think they are rebels from Star Wars have enough power to screw up the world?"
ReplyDeleteWhy are these even questions? History is full of people who made huge changes in the world, or at least screwed with it, all for better or worse, because they imagined themselves as actors in dramas (some purely imaginery or literary, some crude versions of history) they had read or heard about. Columbus imagined himself bringing on the Last Things. Gavrilo Princep and the rest of Union or Death were steeped in Serbian mythology about the Serb noble, Milos Obilic, who slew the sultan at the Battle of Kosovo. Hitler believed himself a Wagnerian hero, especially (according to Kershaw) Cola di Rienzo from the eponymous opera. A former member of the Weather Underground told a friend of mine that a lot of them got their ideas from comic books, not Marcuse. American hawks see everything through the lens of Munich, and fantasy themselves brave visionaries unmasking 1930s appeasement. Examples could be multiplied indefinitely. As you once put it, many people LARP their way into history.
The only question is, are the social webs and formal institutions of liberal-bourgeois routine, order, boredom, and conformity--I use these here as terms of praise--strong enough to keep the fantasists down?
Here's a thinkie-thought related to the comment above, and to the question about industrial revolutions under the last links post: I'm highly skeptical that the desire to make the world anew appeared, so to speak, anew, and was, in itself, enough to create the industrial revolution. Innocent III (Lateran IV is really breathtaking in its ambition, whether one approves of it or not), Henry V, Columbus, Louis XIV, and many others all had very big ideas about how they were going to make the world anew--and that's just to focus on Europeans. Remaking the world with inventions and technical/intellectual discoveries (a la Francis Bacon) may have been (somewhat?) a new idea, but it's possible to exaggerate the degree to which Europeans 1200-1700 just wanted to keep things the same. I say this knowing that, in many quarters, seeking "novelties" was a slur. But not everyone was Bossuet.
ReplyDeleteBut what I really want to say is, I think a huge factor in modernity, and the industrial revolution in particular, is changing attitudes toward debt and credit-worthiness. The more I think about it, the more I see modern civilization as built on certain capacities around debt and finance. The industrial revolution, the modern state, periods of prosperity, the fantasy that deregulation will lead to new prosperity, the combination of vast innovation and the seeming indestructibility of many of our legacy institutions, our ability to keep much of the population docile, etc., etc.--they're all built on debt. Not only--culture does play a role, a hugely important one. I've never studied economics, and hence am too ignorant to give this idea real substance--but I think it's a most important place to look.
One could add democratized comfort, education, social insurance, and consumerism--all built, yes, on modern, more or less capitalist productive capacity, but also on the ways we make and handle and think about credit. And one could cite Sebestyen's debt-dependent narrative of the fall of the Warsaw Pact. But an issue such a theory might need to face could be the way modern (nation?-)states themselves do seem to transcend debt, and even in many cases utter destruction. And perhaps one should extend this to other legacy institutions. There's something about the way modernity builds its institutions that gives it a staying-power more ancient civilizations did not seem to have. What the limits of that staying-power are is a question.
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