Here's What's the Matter With Kansas | Mother Jones

Questions:

Why has income inequality grown so explosively over the past 30 years? Why do so many working and middle class voters cast their ballots for a party that's so obviously a captive of corporations and the rich? Why is there no longer any real sustained effort to improve the lot of the middle class?

and answers.

The fortunes of what we used to call "the middle class" rose and fell with trade unions and the fact that World War II provided a wide open manufacturing market for American goods. Once the rest of the world started to catch up, and more to the point, when we started to import more than we exported, the game was up.

I'd also say that most middle class people today are actually struggling elites - over-educated, white collar, strugglers. The working classes that once swelled the ranks of the middle, are fading back into the lower end, buoyed only by Wal-Mart discounting.

Blaming Corporations

There was a time in the early to mid 90s when Douglas Rushkoff was just about the smartest media critic out there. Not only was he taking the internet seriously, but he was describing it in surprisingly non-techie, non-geekie ways. Before Google and Twitter and Tumblr and RSS etc., etc., Rushkoff described the possibilities of the internet as something very wild and organic and unknowable, as though we'd just discovered a new ecosystem with its own chemistry and physics and tribalism and previously untapped senses.

So when I saw him on Bloggingheads recently discussing his new book "Life Inc," I was surprised at how my immediate gut response was that he'd devolved into a conspiracy theorist and unrepentant crackpot. This just doesn't seem right. Here's some more info if you want to go away and decide for yourself:

• Life Inc: The Book
• An interview in the Guardian

Now the basic premise of the book:

Corporations have taken over every aspect of life, invading even our personal lives and the ways we relate to one another. These corporations have destroyed our economy and left us feeling alienated and powerless. Our sense of individuality has ceased to be based on our true essence but on the brands and consumer choices we make. His solution is that we need to abandon those things that force us to live our lives as consumers and start working locally to rediscover authentic human behaviors that allow us to exchange value through old-fashioned face-to-face conversation and interaction. He advocates alternative forms of currency in order to break the government's monopoly on trade and asserts that the spiritual good of local communities trumps all other concerns.

So at one level this is just college educated, left leaning hipster boilerplate. But on another level I've learned to get nervous when writers assign agency and intentionality to abstractions, transforming them into faceless, evil cabals. We say that corporations do this or that, but isn't it important to keep in mind that corporations are run by people? That the mistakes and overreaching of industry are the mistakes of people serving the interests of their stock holders? And isn't it equally problematic to suggest that consumers are not rational actors who perhaps chose suburbia, banality, and alienation from their fellow man in order to serve their own self-interest? Isn't the dirty secret of life the realization that on the whole, people are pretty lame?

OK, I don't want to be some sort of libertarian shill. I'm not David Brooks. I'm not here to defend Patio-Man. I want Rushkoff's analysis to stand. It's just that at this point it feels flimsy.

Now he gets more specific and detailed. He highlights two distinct historical moments when all this began and so we can judge him solely based on the facts:

• First, he identifies the late middle ages as a key period when monarchs were consolidating their power and inventing the nation state. During this period monarchs took control of their nation's wealth through monopolies and corporations. More importantly the invention of the coin of the realm meant that in order to do commerce you had to do it in ways that served the interests of the king and his corporate minions.
• Second, he sees the post-WWII era as a time when the government used the infrastructure of the suburbs to break-down the military relationships of all those bands of brothers and reintegrated them into society as passive individuals and consumers. If the economy went bad again, those guys were dangerous. They could organize, riot, or even rebel. On the other hand, if they're all living in exile in Levittown, buying washing machines and new cars, they're self-interest is that of the government and the status quo.

My problem is that as powerful as the argument might be, it doesn't seem to me that it is an accurate reflection of history, of the times or how people live. It also gives far too much credit to the power of both modern and medieval governments to control their people, their circumstances, and predetermined outcomes.

What history tells us is that big centralized organizations tend to fail over time and that innovation and action happen at the margins and the fractures and the weak points of society. Opportunity and value come when groups or individuals find niches that the larger society hasn't filled. The systems of organization that live inside the walled city are conservative by nature and therefore slow and unresponsive to societal change. That's why the rise of Microsoft surprised IBM and Microsoft has been unable to respond efficiently to Mozilla, Google, iTunes, Twitter, etc. If corporations were so all powerful we'd still be driving cars from General Motors and buying shares in the East India Company to finance our mortgages.

All that being said, I'm eager to read the book so I can really sink my teeth into what Rushkoff has to say.

Conspiratorial Thinking

Interesting thinking about conspiracy theories.

Robert Horning argues that they are a warped form of non-conformity:

It’s a grandiose way of signaling resistance to the normative culture of our time (to borrow a phrase Amitai Etzioni uses in this TNR article). What is at stake for [the conspiracy theorist] in his Holocaust denial is not history at all or even his urge to disseminate anti-Semitic propaganda. Rather, it’s nothing other than his own reputation as a stalwart nonconformist. Holocaust denial ends up seeming like the extreme version of hating Coldplay because they are popular.

Commenter jimstoic adds:

People want the universe to make sense. It feels imbalanced for one person, like Lee Harvey Oswald, to in a single moment have such a dramatic effect on the the world. The perceived magnitude of the evil far outweighs the perceived magnitude of the perpetrator.

Calm acceptance of this imbalance requires either great faith, or an acceptance that the universe has no inherent meaning. The minds of people between these extremes seek explanations for how a meaningful universe could allow such imbalance.

Frank Furedi writes in sp!ked about the problem of causality:

Conspiratorial thinking is encouraged by a powerful cultural narrative that depicts people, not as the authors of their destiny, but as the objects of manipulative secretive forces. Life is interpreted through the prism of a Hollywood blockbuster, where powerful evil and hidden figures pull all the strings. The flourishing of this imagination springs from mainstream society’s own inability to give an authoritative account of contemporary events. Virtually every aspect of public life is contested today, and there is little agreement on what are the causes of our current predicament. This crisis of causality continually calls into question the official version of events. Of course, the official version of events often needs to be questioned, but not through embracing a simplistic conspiratorial worldview that blames small cliques of evil people for what happens in the world.

The jist is that conspiratorial thinking is a form of healthy skepticism, historical reasoning, and the attribution of cause and effect relationships run amok. Ultimately it's a form of intellectual despair in which the drive to create meaning in history and current affairs is caught in a feedback loop of fanciful associations, biases, obsessions, and prejudices: racism, sexism, xenophobia, and religious intolerance. Typically this results in an understanding of events that is private and self-serving. Real history, on the other hand, seeks to understand how social movements, material circumstances, and individual actions drive the historical narrative with the simplest explanation usually being the best one.

Living the Good Life

Matthew Yglesias had a short post yesterday on "The Tragedy of Agriculture" which attempts to get all counter-intuitive-y on, like, the whole last 10,000 years of human history. But the assertions are so broad and ticked off so quickly that I'm not sure I buy any of it:

Even modern-day hunter-gatherers, who in the nature of things don’t inhabit the most promising land, work shorter hours and enjoy happier lifestyles than do the poorest of modern-day subsistence farmers. The problem with the hunter-gatherer lifestyle wasn’t — and isn’t — that it’s too labor intensive, it’s that it was too land-intensive. A hunter-gatherer lifestyle can only support a small number of people on a given parcel of land. If people somewhere start engaging in a more settled lifestyle, what happens is that population density can go way up. That facilitates the division of labor and the creation of specialized warrior castes and so forth. Consequently, a settled society will probably be able to conquer a hunter-gatherer population and/or drive them off their land. Thus, once this quality-of-life-destroying innovation comes into being it tends to spread inexorably. The higher level of inequality agriculture permits allows some people to be better-off than any hunter-gatherer, but average living standards plummet even as pure quantity of people alive goes way up, a la Derek Parfit’s repugnant conclusion. It’s only with the coming of the industrial revolution that societies with higher average quality-of-life than those enjoyed by hunter-gatherers come into existence. And over time, that circle of beneficiaries of industrialization has tended to spread.

Back in the early 90s it was hunter-gatherer nomad societies that were seen as sort of problematically violent and patriarchal, and the early agricultural societies that were settled, peaceful, and (perhaps) matriarchal. Now we're back to the noble savage approach to hunting societies that shoot deer by day and barbecue at night. As long as they can trade with the agriculturalists for beer, it's a redneck's backwoods paradise.

Otherwise it's a pretty persuasive argument. I'm just not sure I buy into the idea that you can measure quality of life and argue that one group is happier than another, or that the average quality of life is better for one group than another. Were the Vikings happier than the Egyptians? Were the Mongols better off than the Incans? Who can say?

My other issue is that we had the happy-go-lucky hunting lifestyle for hundreds of thousands of years. Basically for as long as we've existed as homo sapiens sapiens. But it's only in the last 10,000 years that we've had art, architecture, myth, literature, technology, etc., etc., all the way up to and including the computer I'm currently typing on. So how do we measure history against pre-history? Were people really better off before the invention of bread, football, and books?

Finally, Parfit's "repugnant conclusion" is just bizarre. He basically argues that it's better to be born than to not be born (pro-life) and therefore, larger populations are always preferable to smaller ones, even if it means that the a very large population is very poor and miserable and that a smaller population is better off and happy. So forget population control, forget education, forget medicine, forget technical advances, forget the environment, forget resource management, forget the water supply, forget global warming. What matters, according to this argument, is that every child not born, is a net social, moral, and ethical loss.

In other words, it's better to exist as gray goo than to be nothing at all.

But what I really think I see here is not a real representation of the historical past, but a desire for something better and different that might relieve the disastisfaction of our post-industrial now. It's a common temptation to want to escape the difficulties and limitations of our complex society for something simpler, something more pastoral, something more back to basics. In the industrial age, the ideal escape was back to the simplicities of the village and the farm. Now in the in the information age, we seem to be fantasizing about the happiness of pre-literature, pre-technological life, when all you needed to know was where the bison were and how to count 1, 2, or many.

Trivializing The Holocaust

Well-intentioned and misguided attempts to educate us on the Holocaust have transformed mass death into kitsch:

We are talking about a period of only a few years in which the equivalent of the entire population of Ohio was wiped off the face of the Earth, after all. The difference is that some movies, like the treacly and dangerously trivializing Life is Beautiful, use the subject as springboard to something else, something more "personal," more selfish. Some people say please, no more of these movies at all, because they begin to become co-opting novelties for people who've no idea of the actual toll of things, don't know the weight of this all too real history. Then things begin to creep closer to the dark shade of the anti-Semitic (in its pointless exploitation, its marginalizing) umbrella, and the whole effort is woefully derailed.

On the other hand, what does Neutral Milk Hotel's re-envisioning of the death of Anne Frank tell us about how art deals with the nightmare of history? Discuss.

Freeman Dyson on Nuclear Weapons

Freeman Dyson uses the World Question Center as an opportunity to demolish some entrenched myths about nuclear weapons:

When facts change your mind, that's not always science. It may be history. I changed my mind about an important historical question: did the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki bring World War Two to an end? Until this year I used to say, perhaps. Now, because of new facts, I say no. This question is important, because the myth of the nuclear bombs bringing the war to an end is widely believed. To demolish this myth may be a useful first step toward ridding the world of nuclear weapons.
.
.
.
In addition to the myth of two nuclear bombs bringing the war to an end, there are other myths that need to be demolished. There is the myth that, if Hitler had acquired nuclear weapons before we did, he could have used them to conquer the world. There is the myth that the invention of the hydrogen bomb changed the nature of nuclear warfare. There is the myth that international agreements to abolish weapons without perfect verification are worthless. All these myths are false. After they are demolished, dramatic moves toward a world without nuclear weapons may become possible.

Abstraction vs. Reality

Myron Magnet has a great article on Thomas Jefferson in City Journal. As Magnet tells it, Jefferson's belief in rationality and natural order is the basis for the national myth that has held the United States together for more than 200 years. Not myth as falsehood, but myth as poetic truth, an ideal, something we aspire to in spite of the contingencies and necessities of life. His devotion to the abstract ideals of Democracy were at odds with many features of his own life, as well as the political realities of the times. One of the things that Magnet points out is that Jefferson really did believe that greater truths were self-evident, and therefore beyond the checks and balances of Hamilton's notion of competing interests.

Yet his rationalism proved invaluable to the republic not just at its founding but at its moment of greatest crisis, when it had to break with its historical past and square the circle he himself couldn’t square. At Gettysburg, in the midst of the Civil War, Lincoln invoked the words of the Declaration of Independence to explain what the war was about: that the nation “conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal” needed “a new birth of freedom” to include all men in that proposition. The abstraction, not the history, was at that moment our true national identity. And in the ever-growing consciousness of man’s freedom that is the true meaning of history, Jefferson might have said, so it became.

In Lincoln's speech the two competing threads of America as it is dreamed and America as it is lived came together at a critical moment, and the nation was revived. For many Americans World War II represents a similar moment. But what becomes of America now when the Shock Doctrine replaces the Declaration of Independence, and the reality of competing interests becomes the tyranny of wealth and power?

All-in-all a great article that's also rich in biographical details.