Writing about the issue of social withdrawal--certainly writing about social withdrawal in the sense of individuals' withdrawal from the job market, marriage market, family-raising that they are conventionally expected to treat as the ends of "grown-up" life I have argued again and again over the years that the growth of the tendency has been a response to broader social conditions. Simply put, finishing school, getting a job and devoting the rest of one's life to it as they bear the conventional burdens of being a householder is just not a terribly attractive or pleasant thing for most--and as that has grown less so all the time these past several decades. The neoliberal age, after all, has meant working people giving more and getting less, enough so that college looks less and less the ticket to middle classness that it was supposed to be (I have actually found it appropriate to speak of the pursuit of college degrees as having become comprehensible in the terms we ordinarily apply to economic bubbles), all as those who do get middle-class jobs likely find themselves less and less able to afford the middle-class living standard supposed to go with them in an age of heavier student debts, greater insecurity, and the exploding costs of essentials like housing and health care. (Indeed, it seems worth noting that Emmanuel Todd has gone so far as to correlate a country's being an economic success in neoliberal terms with the plunging of its fertility rate as middle-class people find raising a family in what middle class people traditionally regard as decent conditions, with a minimum of security, increasingly implausible.)
The COVID-19 pandemic has, of course, heightened attention to the issue--as the self-isolation many pursued for extended periods to stay safe, the shift of many jobs to a "telecommuting" basis, the "burn-out" workers in many fields suffered, the loss of employment, the way crises and even just the jolting of people out of their routines compels them to reassess their lives, etc. found expressions ranging from resistance to a shift back to the office as telecommuting-hating employers demanded a reversion to the status quo ante, historic levels of resignation by workers, and signs of a new "wave" of Americans "turning hikikomori."
Still, if the issue has got more attention the thinking about it did not change. The tendency remains just as it was before to see those withdrawing as suffering from psychological problems, or simply "refusing to grow up," rather than in any way responding to limited and unattractive choices, or worsening social conditions. The result is that I was quite struck by an essay by one Nicky Reid about the matter in which she dared to argue that "Adulthood is a Racket That Millennials are Right to Reject." I doubt that her argument will make any of "the sanctimonious adults" she talks about question their attitude toward young people who refuse to fall in line with societal expectations--but anyone more open-minded about the possibility that something more complex is happening here than simply "kids with bad attitudes" acting out ought to give her concise, forceful, and never dull essay a read.
Sunday, January 28, 2024
Looking Back at Emmanuel Todd's Record of Prediction
Recently Pepe Escobar, alert to Emmanuel Todd's difficulties finding publishers and media opportunities in his native France, wrote of Todd's publication of his latest book there as a "small miracle." Perhaps this is an overstatement on Mr. Escobar's part, but it is definitely the case that the intellectual climate in that country is none too friendly to Todd these days, with the reviews of La Défaite de l’Occident (The Defeat of the West) beginning to appear looking all too predictably brutal. Exemplary is the piece by Florent Georgesco in Le Monde, who from his title forward appeals to cheap and stupid "What the hell do you know?"-type epistemological nihilism by mocking Emmanuel Todd as having since 1976 "exerce le métier de prophète" (exercised the profession of prophet") so that he can beat up on him by way of beating up on the pretensions of prophets generally (rather than judging Todd as a social scientist who, like any other social scientist, after studying the past and present, draws conclusions about what will happen on the basis of logical cause-and-effect reasoning from the facts).
Considering this rather shabby piece of "reviewing" I found myself looking back at the two books that, as Mssr. Georgesco acknowledges in the most sneering tones, made Todd's reputation, starting with The Final Fall. In that book Todd was not the first to predict the collapse of the Soviet Union. However, Todd did register that it was slipping into a phase of economic stagnation (evident in demographic data testifying to ultimately short-lived but nevertheless notable stresses) under an elite that had long ceased to truly take the official ideology seriously, leaving them a pack of self-seekers at the head of a troubled system; and that the increasing pressure for reform would compel liberalization that would open a space for centrifugal forces that would first tear away the Soviet Union's Warsaw Pact satellites (a rich "periphery" to its poor "core," with all the untenability of the situation that implied), and then the non-Russian republics.
All of this actually did happen in this way in the years that followed, with the process running its course within fifteen years of the publication by Todd of his book. Because Todd did not simply say "The Soviet Union will be gone in fifteen years" but explained how and why this would happen in terms sufficiently precise that one can check them against the facts of the historical record--statistically evidentiated stagnation leading to a high-risk reform process leading to break-up in the sequence he stated (satellites first, non-Russian republics second)--it seems fair to, even if Todd did not cover every part of the story (one should not overlook the extent to which the Soviet Union's dissolution was a result of that self-seeking elite deciding that being capitalist oligarchs was better than being apparatchiks in a degenerated worker's state, and he did not deal with this here), credit Todd with having had a good deal of insight into the reality rather than merely "getting lucky" because events happened to broadly correspond to some vague claim on his part.
Todd's other principal work of "prophecy" is After the Empire--the success of which I think is rather more debatable. As I noted his vision of a U.S. "living beyond its means" losing its hegemonic position as a result of being forced to accommodate itself to its more limited power base after the dollar loses its privileged place in the international monetary order due to the rise of Europe (in which Britain's signing on with the European project and Europe reaching an accommodation with Russia would play their part) simply did not come to pass even two decades on (or, arguably, even begun to happen in an unambiguous way, such as may have been claimed for his Soviet prediction years before the Soviet bloc's collapse). Still, if events have not validated Todd's thesis, one can still say that at a time in which not only Americans but other Frenchmen spoke of the U.S. as a "hyperpower," question the dynamism and substance of the U.S. economy in the late 1990s,;and if the U.S. economy was not revealed as a collection of Enrons the way he thought possible, the tech boom proved blip rather than new normal, the growth of the U.S. slower and its economy increasingly open to charges of hollowness as deindustrialization and its ill effects became an increasing factor in the U.S.' domestic and international situation. And just as Todd was right about that, he was (even as many persons getting much more respect in the Western press continued to predict Russian collapse) right about Russia's decline having bottomed out about the turn of the century, with its military capacities again becoming a factor in international life. It seems fair, too, to acknowledge that Todd was right about the U.S. becoming less universalist and more differentialist in its domestic life as in its attitude toward the rest of the world--all as the country had ceased to meaningfully debate its problems many years earlier (Todd correctly identifying 1995 as that turning point, and rather properly calling out Paul Krugman as a "fake nonconformist").
All of this is far from nothing--and if it did not translate to the kind of dramatic, qualitative shift in the U.S. positon that Todd predicted, it did at least correspond to the U.S. facing a different (from a power standpoint, much less favorable) situation than the one fancied by theoreticians of a "unipolar moment" who had been far more fashionable at that time (even as one who disagrees with much that Todd has said over the years, and not least the arguments he makes in his latest), and like Todd's analysis it bespoke a fairly solid grasp on many important realities, rather more solid than that of many of his contemporaries--such that for all the book's limitations, After the Empire remains worth reading now, in a way that few books on international relations from 2002 about the international scene still are a near-quarter of a century after their first publication.
Considering this rather shabby piece of "reviewing" I found myself looking back at the two books that, as Mssr. Georgesco acknowledges in the most sneering tones, made Todd's reputation, starting with The Final Fall. In that book Todd was not the first to predict the collapse of the Soviet Union. However, Todd did register that it was slipping into a phase of economic stagnation (evident in demographic data testifying to ultimately short-lived but nevertheless notable stresses) under an elite that had long ceased to truly take the official ideology seriously, leaving them a pack of self-seekers at the head of a troubled system; and that the increasing pressure for reform would compel liberalization that would open a space for centrifugal forces that would first tear away the Soviet Union's Warsaw Pact satellites (a rich "periphery" to its poor "core," with all the untenability of the situation that implied), and then the non-Russian republics.
All of this actually did happen in this way in the years that followed, with the process running its course within fifteen years of the publication by Todd of his book. Because Todd did not simply say "The Soviet Union will be gone in fifteen years" but explained how and why this would happen in terms sufficiently precise that one can check them against the facts of the historical record--statistically evidentiated stagnation leading to a high-risk reform process leading to break-up in the sequence he stated (satellites first, non-Russian republics second)--it seems fair to, even if Todd did not cover every part of the story (one should not overlook the extent to which the Soviet Union's dissolution was a result of that self-seeking elite deciding that being capitalist oligarchs was better than being apparatchiks in a degenerated worker's state, and he did not deal with this here), credit Todd with having had a good deal of insight into the reality rather than merely "getting lucky" because events happened to broadly correspond to some vague claim on his part.
Todd's other principal work of "prophecy" is After the Empire--the success of which I think is rather more debatable. As I noted his vision of a U.S. "living beyond its means" losing its hegemonic position as a result of being forced to accommodate itself to its more limited power base after the dollar loses its privileged place in the international monetary order due to the rise of Europe (in which Britain's signing on with the European project and Europe reaching an accommodation with Russia would play their part) simply did not come to pass even two decades on (or, arguably, even begun to happen in an unambiguous way, such as may have been claimed for his Soviet prediction years before the Soviet bloc's collapse). Still, if events have not validated Todd's thesis, one can still say that at a time in which not only Americans but other Frenchmen spoke of the U.S. as a "hyperpower," question the dynamism and substance of the U.S. economy in the late 1990s,;and if the U.S. economy was not revealed as a collection of Enrons the way he thought possible, the tech boom proved blip rather than new normal, the growth of the U.S. slower and its economy increasingly open to charges of hollowness as deindustrialization and its ill effects became an increasing factor in the U.S.' domestic and international situation. And just as Todd was right about that, he was (even as many persons getting much more respect in the Western press continued to predict Russian collapse) right about Russia's decline having bottomed out about the turn of the century, with its military capacities again becoming a factor in international life. It seems fair, too, to acknowledge that Todd was right about the U.S. becoming less universalist and more differentialist in its domestic life as in its attitude toward the rest of the world--all as the country had ceased to meaningfully debate its problems many years earlier (Todd correctly identifying 1995 as that turning point, and rather properly calling out Paul Krugman as a "fake nonconformist").
All of this is far from nothing--and if it did not translate to the kind of dramatic, qualitative shift in the U.S. positon that Todd predicted, it did at least correspond to the U.S. facing a different (from a power standpoint, much less favorable) situation than the one fancied by theoreticians of a "unipolar moment" who had been far more fashionable at that time (even as one who disagrees with much that Todd has said over the years, and not least the arguments he makes in his latest), and like Todd's analysis it bespoke a fairly solid grasp on many important realities, rather more solid than that of many of his contemporaries--such that for all the book's limitations, After the Empire remains worth reading now, in a way that few books on international relations from 2002 about the international scene still are a near-quarter of a century after their first publication.
Paris and its Relation to the Rest of France: A Few Notes
Reading the classics of nineteenth century French literature one quickly gets a sense of just how central the city of Paris was within French life--or at least, those aspects of life to which the more privileged were attentive, the young provincial looking to make a career for himself always seemingly heading to Paris. Thus does, even in that tale of two centuries earlier, Alexander Dumas open the saga of young D'Artagnan with a scene of him making his way there on horseback--while in novels by Balzac such as Lost Illusions (in the story of Lucien du Rubempre another tale of a young provincial going to the capital), or The Two Brothers, it is the case that simply going from Paris to the provinces, or from the provinces to Paris, is enough to rattle a person's standards of beauty, elegance, grace (in Lost Illusions, where Lucien and Madame de Bargeton do not look so good to each other after a very short time sitting in a Parisian opera house, just the beginning of an eventually disastrous train of events).*
The sense of the city's centrality endures today, not least where the composition of the uppermost levels of government is concerned--such persons apt to have been born, raised, schooled and worked their whole lives within a few square miles within Paris, and in the view of their critics, knowing or caring little or nothing of the rest of the country (in the words of Simon Kuper, "treat[ing] the rest of France almost like a colony, inhabited by smelly peasants").
Considering this one may make a comparison with the U.S.. The United States has always had its regional differences, and resentments--North and South, East and West, interior and coast, etc.--but there was never any period in which a single city loomed so large, never mind for so long. Indeed, construction on the palace of Versailles was underway before the founding of the first real American metropolis, Boston, while that city was not very long in being challenged or eclipsed by others--most obviously New York, all as the functions of a national capital tended to be widely distributed. Thus Washington D.C. became the seat of government--even as the United Nations headquarters went to New York. If New York has a stronger standing as the financial capital of the country, Chicago is to commodities what New York is to the stock market. If New York has a status as cultural capital, while it dominates publishing, theater, fashion and the visual arts, Los Angeles is the central location in film and television production (even as that is being diffused about the country), music is even more dispersed (not just a Los Angeles but even a Nashville is a center here), and the most prestigious national university lies outside its boundaries (back in old Boston, even as it has slid below Oklahoma City in population, and Phoenix in the population of its larger metro area). Indeed, even such sneering terms as "flyover country" bespeak the diffusion of the nation's life. If those living in the major urban centers of the East coast have no interest in large parts of the United States, they do acknowledge the existence of important centers on the West coast. By contrast Parisian centrality in French life seems far less qualified--and with it the sharpness of the divide between center and provinces, containing, among much else, frequent reminders that ignorance about the larger world is pretty much a feature of elite life wherever one goes on the planet.
* In The Two Brothers after having journeyed from Paris to Issoudun the painter Joseph Bridau, gazing upon the woman they have come to stop from swindling his uncle out of his fortune, is so taken with her beauty that he declares at once his eagerness to paint her, and then being criticized his relatives for the remark amid a family crisis admits that he "did wrong," then adds (less than diplomatically) "you must remember that ever since leaving Paris I have seen nothing but ugly women."
The sense of the city's centrality endures today, not least where the composition of the uppermost levels of government is concerned--such persons apt to have been born, raised, schooled and worked their whole lives within a few square miles within Paris, and in the view of their critics, knowing or caring little or nothing of the rest of the country (in the words of Simon Kuper, "treat[ing] the rest of France almost like a colony, inhabited by smelly peasants").
Considering this one may make a comparison with the U.S.. The United States has always had its regional differences, and resentments--North and South, East and West, interior and coast, etc.--but there was never any period in which a single city loomed so large, never mind for so long. Indeed, construction on the palace of Versailles was underway before the founding of the first real American metropolis, Boston, while that city was not very long in being challenged or eclipsed by others--most obviously New York, all as the functions of a national capital tended to be widely distributed. Thus Washington D.C. became the seat of government--even as the United Nations headquarters went to New York. If New York has a stronger standing as the financial capital of the country, Chicago is to commodities what New York is to the stock market. If New York has a status as cultural capital, while it dominates publishing, theater, fashion and the visual arts, Los Angeles is the central location in film and television production (even as that is being diffused about the country), music is even more dispersed (not just a Los Angeles but even a Nashville is a center here), and the most prestigious national university lies outside its boundaries (back in old Boston, even as it has slid below Oklahoma City in population, and Phoenix in the population of its larger metro area). Indeed, even such sneering terms as "flyover country" bespeak the diffusion of the nation's life. If those living in the major urban centers of the East coast have no interest in large parts of the United States, they do acknowledge the existence of important centers on the West coast. By contrast Parisian centrality in French life seems far less qualified--and with it the sharpness of the divide between center and provinces, containing, among much else, frequent reminders that ignorance about the larger world is pretty much a feature of elite life wherever one goes on the planet.
* In The Two Brothers after having journeyed from Paris to Issoudun the painter Joseph Bridau, gazing upon the woman they have come to stop from swindling his uncle out of his fortune, is so taken with her beauty that he declares at once his eagerness to paint her, and then being criticized his relatives for the remark amid a family crisis admits that he "did wrong," then adds (less than diplomatically) "you must remember that ever since leaving Paris I have seen nothing but ugly women."
Who is Reading Emmanuel Todd Now?
Those commentators on public affairs who want to avoid a particular political label often display pretenses to greater idiosyncrasy in their outlooks than they really possess--and get away with it the more easily in America, at least, because in the hypocritical squeamishness about "ideology" that has prevailed for decades our politics are so much a matter of responses to disconnected issues, with the reality that larger premises about the world are involved in their responses is relentlessly downplayed. (Indeed, the so-called punditry seems scarcely able to use terms like "conservatism" and "liberalism" correctly--and compounds its disservice to all dependent on it by vehemently defending its own incoherence and ignorance in the name of "common usage.")
Still, it does seem to me fair to say that Emmanuel Todd's politics have genuinely defied easy labeling--and certainly when one looks at the longer sweep of his career. Reading The Final Fall, for example, one finds that Todd is no Marxist, or even socialist--but he was prepared to credit Marx with identifying some of capitalism's weaknesses, and capitalist reformers with redressing them, such that I think he could be safely identified with support for the post-war "Keynesian" compromise and the center-left as it stood then. He also seems to have adhered to this position in subsequent decades, even as the center-left increasingly accommodated itself to neoliberalism, and neoconservatism, of which Todd became a staunch critic, certainly as seen in works like After the Empire, and his commentary up to the present.
In the process Todd came to seem "left" of what had become center-left, even if not necessarily "left" in the old sense. Meanwhile, it is the case that in looking at less solidly material aspects of life he has set himself apart from many at this end of the spectrum. While Todd has been a formidable opponent of racial and religious bigotry, who has explicitly declared himself on the side of both women's liberation and gay and lesbian liberation, the fact remains that he has also turned a critical eye on American "multiculturalism," the #MeToo movement, the discourse about trans persons, and the decline of religiosity, all of which would seem to have been unhelpful to him in these quarters--while actually appearing to get him attention from some quarters of the right.* Certainly surveying the press Todd has got for his latest book it has seemed to me that it has been publications of the right that have been more likely to mention his work, favorably citing his remarks about the consequences of Protestantism's decline in its old North European and North American core--even as they take little interest in the rest of what he has to say.
* Todd specifically raised the matter of multiculturalism in After the Empire, where he saw it as indicative of an America that was becoming less universalist and more differentialist--while arguing that the American multicultural model was failing (interestingly, on the basis of infant mortality data such as was so important to his famous argument about Soviet failure), and also having some critical words for American feminism on this score. Todd has been more attentive to the matter of gender in Lineages of the Feminine, and The Defeat of the West.
Still, it does seem to me fair to say that Emmanuel Todd's politics have genuinely defied easy labeling--and certainly when one looks at the longer sweep of his career. Reading The Final Fall, for example, one finds that Todd is no Marxist, or even socialist--but he was prepared to credit Marx with identifying some of capitalism's weaknesses, and capitalist reformers with redressing them, such that I think he could be safely identified with support for the post-war "Keynesian" compromise and the center-left as it stood then. He also seems to have adhered to this position in subsequent decades, even as the center-left increasingly accommodated itself to neoliberalism, and neoconservatism, of which Todd became a staunch critic, certainly as seen in works like After the Empire, and his commentary up to the present.
In the process Todd came to seem "left" of what had become center-left, even if not necessarily "left" in the old sense. Meanwhile, it is the case that in looking at less solidly material aspects of life he has set himself apart from many at this end of the spectrum. While Todd has been a formidable opponent of racial and religious bigotry, who has explicitly declared himself on the side of both women's liberation and gay and lesbian liberation, the fact remains that he has also turned a critical eye on American "multiculturalism," the #MeToo movement, the discourse about trans persons, and the decline of religiosity, all of which would seem to have been unhelpful to him in these quarters--while actually appearing to get him attention from some quarters of the right.* Certainly surveying the press Todd has got for his latest book it has seemed to me that it has been publications of the right that have been more likely to mention his work, favorably citing his remarks about the consequences of Protestantism's decline in its old North European and North American core--even as they take little interest in the rest of what he has to say.
* Todd specifically raised the matter of multiculturalism in After the Empire, where he saw it as indicative of an America that was becoming less universalist and more differentialist--while arguing that the American multicultural model was failing (interestingly, on the basis of infant mortality data such as was so important to his famous argument about Soviet failure), and also having some critical words for American feminism on this score. Todd has been more attentive to the matter of gender in Lineages of the Feminine, and The Defeat of the West.
Where Did the "European Dream" Come From Anyway?
Not long ago I again took up the issue of the "European Dream" some left-leaning observers of the international scene held in the earlier part of this century--their hope that if the U.S. was unlikely to deviate from the neoliberal-neoconservative path they found troubling the European Union could play a more constructive role in international affairs, helping in peacemaking, facilitating international development, and leading the way on climate change in the ways the U.S. had signally failed to do.
Such hopes have long since waned as Europe has proven to be led by an elite just as neoliberal and neoconservative as its American counterpart, as seen not only in the legacy of the reforms they were already instituting in the early 2000s (as with the Harz reforms in Germany), but their conduct in the wake of the 2007 financial crisis (exemplified by the brutalization of Greece); and their propensity for military intervention in Libya and elsewhere. (One may say that this turn has been evident, too, in the way that the American press has laid off the formerly furious Europe-bashing to display a much more approving attitude of European conduct.)
In hindsight it seems to me the expectation of a Europe being a center-left alternative to the right-wing U.S. in international life was implausible, and I found myself wondering why so many held it, focusing on the American (and more broadly, Anglosphere) observers who thought this way. My conclusion was that their expectation was, frankly, a function of a simple-minded view of Europe rooted in cartoonish stereotype and plain ignorance. In spite of ancestry and familial links; their tendencies with regard to travel in the case of tourism, study, business, military service; the foreign languages they are most likely to acquire and foreign literature they are most likely to read (if admittedly they are monolingual and don't read much" of anything, let alone literature, in any language); the American policy elite (and that of other closely associated nations) tend to be profoundly ignorant about Europe on the whole, such that even if they do not need to be told that "Europe is not a country" the way they do Africa, their knowledge about it would not seem to extend much further than that.
One aspect of this is their obliviousness to such things as the differences not just between European nations but within European nations. Even in an era in which Thatcherism, deindustrialization, Brexit have given regional differences within England itself a new topical, how many know Cornwall from Yorkshire, let alone either from Surrey? (Indeed, the American commentariat's obliviousness to such parts of England is underlined by how Thomas Frank correctly saw it as worthwhile to head to the industrial heartland of north England in Brexit's wake.) How many grasp the lingering differences between "Ossi" and "Wessi" in Germany (especially insofar as they are unable to see German reunification in terms of anything but Cold War triumphalism)? Of the relations between Paris and the "provinces?" Few indeed--which is just one factor in their having a grossly oversimplified picture, along with the tendency to, at least as much as anywhere else, equate Europe with its ultra-privileged upper crust (as seen in the equation of the Englishman with the "English gentleman"), reinforced by European high fashion and the like. (Thus do American advertisers insult their viewers' intelligence by saying of some such good that "It's European!" expecting the American to say "Ooh, I'll take it!"--to the point of getting a man who would never carry a purse to . . . carry a purse.)
All of this has served that commentariat poorly in thinking about Europe in the past (to the extent that they were trying to do their jobs at all rather than play courtier). It continues to serve them poorly now--and will likely do only worse in the years ahead, promising as they do a far more difficult and dangerous international scene.
Such hopes have long since waned as Europe has proven to be led by an elite just as neoliberal and neoconservative as its American counterpart, as seen not only in the legacy of the reforms they were already instituting in the early 2000s (as with the Harz reforms in Germany), but their conduct in the wake of the 2007 financial crisis (exemplified by the brutalization of Greece); and their propensity for military intervention in Libya and elsewhere. (One may say that this turn has been evident, too, in the way that the American press has laid off the formerly furious Europe-bashing to display a much more approving attitude of European conduct.)
In hindsight it seems to me the expectation of a Europe being a center-left alternative to the right-wing U.S. in international life was implausible, and I found myself wondering why so many held it, focusing on the American (and more broadly, Anglosphere) observers who thought this way. My conclusion was that their expectation was, frankly, a function of a simple-minded view of Europe rooted in cartoonish stereotype and plain ignorance. In spite of ancestry and familial links; their tendencies with regard to travel in the case of tourism, study, business, military service; the foreign languages they are most likely to acquire and foreign literature they are most likely to read (if admittedly they are monolingual and don't read much" of anything, let alone literature, in any language); the American policy elite (and that of other closely associated nations) tend to be profoundly ignorant about Europe on the whole, such that even if they do not need to be told that "Europe is not a country" the way they do Africa, their knowledge about it would not seem to extend much further than that.
One aspect of this is their obliviousness to such things as the differences not just between European nations but within European nations. Even in an era in which Thatcherism, deindustrialization, Brexit have given regional differences within England itself a new topical, how many know Cornwall from Yorkshire, let alone either from Surrey? (Indeed, the American commentariat's obliviousness to such parts of England is underlined by how Thomas Frank correctly saw it as worthwhile to head to the industrial heartland of north England in Brexit's wake.) How many grasp the lingering differences between "Ossi" and "Wessi" in Germany (especially insofar as they are unable to see German reunification in terms of anything but Cold War triumphalism)? Of the relations between Paris and the "provinces?" Few indeed--which is just one factor in their having a grossly oversimplified picture, along with the tendency to, at least as much as anywhere else, equate Europe with its ultra-privileged upper crust (as seen in the equation of the Englishman with the "English gentleman"), reinforced by European high fashion and the like. (Thus do American advertisers insult their viewers' intelligence by saying of some such good that "It's European!" expecting the American to say "Ooh, I'll take it!"--to the point of getting a man who would never carry a purse to . . . carry a purse.)
All of this has served that commentariat poorly in thinking about Europe in the past (to the extent that they were trying to do their jobs at all rather than play courtier). It continues to serve them poorly now--and will likely do only worse in the years ahead, promising as they do a far more difficult and dangerous international scene.
Monday, January 22, 2024
How Young People Get Their News
We have heard much in recent years about people increasingly getting their news from less conventional sources--and amid this, much about the evolution of media.
The aspect of this that interests me most at the moment is the attitude toward reading rather than watching the news.
I personally prefer to read my news--because it is easier and quicker to take an initial survey of a piece of text in systematic fashion (or as they say in composition courses, "preview" it), figure out in advance what it has to offer and whether it is worth my time, go straight to the material that seems most likely to be relevant, go back over the rest of the text if I decide it warrants a fuller examination that may extend to a proper read through, etc., than to do these things with a video, with this all the more the case if watching the video at all requires me to first sit through an obnoxious, three-times-as-loud piece of advertising. In fact, if I click on a link in a news aggregator or elsewhere expecting an article and am instead led to a video my usual response is to simply not bother with the item and go on looking until I find an article.
Apparently this is the norm. But it seems that it is less the norm with younger groups, who incline more toward video.
It seems worth asking why that is the case. Is it that, perhaps, they have become more adroit than their elders at extracting useful information from video? Or is it that they are just that much more averse to reading--find it so much a pain that they will just sit through a video instead if the opportunity is available? (And, perhaps, that because they are less experienced and less willing and poorer readers, that they lack the kind of "close reading" skills that enable many to find reading rather than watching more efficient?)
What are your thoughts on that, readers?
The aspect of this that interests me most at the moment is the attitude toward reading rather than watching the news.
Apparently this is the norm. But it seems that it is less the norm with younger groups, who incline more toward video.
It seems worth asking why that is the case. Is it that, perhaps, they have become more adroit than their elders at extracting useful information from video? Or is it that they are just that much more averse to reading--find it so much a pain that they will just sit through a video instead if the opportunity is available? (And, perhaps, that because they are less experienced and less willing and poorer readers, that they lack the kind of "close reading" skills that enable many to find reading rather than watching more efficient?)
What are your thoughts on that, readers?
How Far Has China Gone Toward "Exceeding the UK?"
"Exceeding the UK, catching the USA" was apparently a slogan of industrial development in China during the Maoist era.
Where "exceeding the UK" in manufacturing was concerned China would seem to have done that by the end of the 1970s--in the aggregate. In per capita terms the UK, with a population about one-seventeenth of China's at the time, was still the far greater producer.
However, as might be expected given China's rapid growth as a manufacturing power (and Britain's troubles in this era, worsened by the course the country has taken since the Thatcher era, with the trend especially bad since the Great Recession), has seen it close the gap in per capita terms as well.
Back in 2018 it appeared that China's per capita manufacturing value added equaled about 70 percent of Britain's. Checking the most recent figures I found that in 2022 China's per capita value added in that area was 93 percent that of Britain ($3600 vs. $3900 in current dollars).
At that rate it is likely that within the mid-2020s China will catch up Britain in per capita terms. One may add that it will catch up France (whose own process of deindustrialization has left it in about the same place) as well.
In doing so China, which has long ago left well behind even the more advanced of the developing countries such as Mexico, Turkey and Thailand, or even a Malaysia, when judged by this metric, will be on par with the bottom of the Group of Seven advanced industrialized nations. A significant testament to the distance that China has traveled developmentally, it is also a testament to the decline of some of the older industrial powers, and the shifting of the distribution of the world's industrial and economic power in the process.
Where "exceeding the UK" in manufacturing was concerned China would seem to have done that by the end of the 1970s--in the aggregate. In per capita terms the UK, with a population about one-seventeenth of China's at the time, was still the far greater producer.
However, as might be expected given China's rapid growth as a manufacturing power (and Britain's troubles in this era, worsened by the course the country has taken since the Thatcher era, with the trend especially bad since the Great Recession), has seen it close the gap in per capita terms as well.
Back in 2018 it appeared that China's per capita manufacturing value added equaled about 70 percent of Britain's. Checking the most recent figures I found that in 2022 China's per capita value added in that area was 93 percent that of Britain ($3600 vs. $3900 in current dollars).
At that rate it is likely that within the mid-2020s China will catch up Britain in per capita terms. One may add that it will catch up France (whose own process of deindustrialization has left it in about the same place) as well.
In doing so China, which has long ago left well behind even the more advanced of the developing countries such as Mexico, Turkey and Thailand, or even a Malaysia, when judged by this metric, will be on par with the bottom of the Group of Seven advanced industrialized nations. A significant testament to the distance that China has traveled developmentally, it is also a testament to the decline of some of the older industrial powers, and the shifting of the distribution of the world's industrial and economic power in the process.
What Has Emmanuel Todd Been Up to Lately?
It has been some time since Emmanuel Todd's media presence has been this strong. The demographer, anthropologist and historian who produced The Final Fall and After the Empire, if not getting so much attention for his recent book on the war in Ukraine as one would expect from the reception to his past books (World War Three Has Already Begun was actually published in Japan, not France), and at least in the English-speaking world not getting more than that for Où en Sont-Elles?: Une Esquisse de l'Histoire des Femmes (recently published in English translation in Britain as Lineages of the Feminine, but apparently pretty much ignored by reviewers in the Anglosphere), is getting more notice for his latest--La Défaite de l'Occident (translatable as The Defeat of the West). Indeed, in his native France he has been making the rounds of the press, giving interviews to the newspapers Le Figaro, Le Point and Le Journal de Dimanche, the news magazine Marianne, and French radio (RMC) and television (TV5), with the contents of these interviews appearing in whole or in part translated into media outlets not only across the European continent (I have seen pieces from Germany, Italy, Spain, Norway, Hungary, Greece), but beyond, from Azerbaijan to Vietnam (if, again, attracting very little notice in the English-speaking world thus far).
Todd has, in his discussions with his various interlocutors (and presumably in his book), continued to apply many of his established methods to recent events, and in the process extended old arguments. As was the case in After the Empire two decades ago, he argues for a United States whose power is overstated, as a result of a long (post-1965) decline in which deindustrialization under neoliberal policies has factored significantly, and the decay of its "soft" power with other countries amid changes in its values--with this given point by the country's involvement in conflicts abroad that bespeak both its policy elite's irrationality and its weakening practical military capacity; the rebound of a Russia supposedly on the verge of collapse, demographically and in other ways; and the prospect of Russia reaching an accommodation with Europe that, having suffered for following the U.S. in its path (in its own deindustrialization, for example), may assert itself newly as the United States weakens. In the course of making this argument Todd's remarks also seem consistent with his past work in premises, methodology and even his smaller conclusions, from his high stress on demographic data as an indicator of important social shifts, to the divergence between the U.S. and other countries in attitudes toward gender, to the decay of democracy in its old North Atlantic heartland as the U.S., Britain and France become more unequal and oligarchical. Indeed, this book much more recalls the Todd of twenty years ago than it does the Todd of ten years ago, when anxious about an increasingly powerful and dictatorial Germany's role in Europe he was prone to stress the community of values and interests between France and the Anglo-Saxon powers (the more in as it is specifically by way of such a Russo-German accommodation that there would be a Russo-European accommodation).
However, if much is familiar here (so much that some may be tempted to think Todd has simply refurbished old arguments), there is much that is different, and important. Todd, as one may have observed in his prior writing, has inclined to a view of modernity as being in crisis amid a collapse of fertility rates to below (often far below) replacement levels. (Indeed, it is with discussion of this crisis that he opens his prior Lineages of the Feminine.) And while he has been attentive to material factors here (in particular, criticizing neoliberalism as making it less and less possible for people with middle-class values and expectations to consider themselves in a position to properly bring up children), he also seems to think that there is as yet no solution precisely, and to have not just placed a greater stress than in his more geopolitically-oriented prior writing on gender, but a heavier one on religion (or at least, the traditional religious faith of the Western countries) than in the past. Indeed, Todd, for whom a major theme here is the state of Protestantism in those Western countries where it has long been the predominant religion (the U.S., Britain, Germany, the Scandinavian countries), has gone so far as to characterize his book as a "sequel" to Max Weber's classic study The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism--dealing with the consequences of the "death" of Protestantism as Weber did with those of its rise. Where in Todd's view in these countries Protestantism had for decades been only a "zombie religion" (in which belief in the religion's theology passes but respect for its moral guidance and values endures) he sees it as having since gone over to the "zero" state in their societies (where respect for the morals and values also goes, the religion gone from undead to dead), and correlating this with their attitudes toward gender (specifically the acceptance of "same-sex marriage," and acceptance of transgenderism). While Todd is not nostalgic for a more religious past, and pointedly acknowledges what he sees as the less happy side of this religious inheritance whose passing may be viewed as positive (as with an inegalitarian outlook that contributed to extreme forms of bigotry), he also sees Protestantism's passing as having played its part in American/Western economic decline, specifically through American/Western esteem for education, work and community integration passing along with it. Todd also sees the shift of Protestantism from the zombie to the zero state as more broadly contributing to a "nihilistic" cultural stance he sees as evident in U.S. cultural attitudes and foreign policy (narcissistic, destructive). In Todd's analysis all these merge in the combination of military conflict with "culture war," in which Russia has translated its conservative position into considerable soft power, alongside its recovering material strength, which he regards as being bolstered by a wartime import-substitution program making it a more, not less, dynamic modernizer and technological power, testimony to which is Russia's appearing more successful than the West in keeping its side supplied with ammunition. (In explaining this Todd stresses Russia's relatively very high output of trained engineers, reflective of a Communist stress on education, and especially education of this kind, whose benefits Russia continues to reap as the U.S. no longer does the benefits of its own, past, ethic, in this area.)
Altogether Todd gives us a lot to consider here, more than I think I can respond to all of as yet. Still, I admit that I have always found "hard," material, explanations far more satisfying than "soft" ideal or cultural ones for phenomena such as economic rise and decline. The result is that while it certainly seems to me fair to speak of deindustrialization; and even date the beginnings of U.S. decline here to about 1965 as he does; it also seems to me that this has had less to do with the decline of values, or educational failures emanating from any source (the cry that the country's problems are due to a shortage of STEM skills is an old racket too often treated uncritically), and much more to do with the exhaustion of the potentials of the post-World War II arrangements for sustaining a growing world economy, after which economic performance became more troubled and the arrangements unraveled (as seen with the beginning of the end of American manufacturing's long expansion and of the gold standard), with, to little surprise given the state of politics in the U.S. (the predominance of a conservative center ever more prepared to move right than left, the virtual non-existence of a left in an American discourse alongside the existence of a very powerful, reactionary, right, etc.), the country shifting rightwards, and in the process producing the neoliberal model as we know it. And if there have been changes in values, or at least behavior, the direction of change ran the opposite way, with the economic model the cause rather than the byproduct, as the proponents of a shift in model that had no popular base legitimized and encouraged adaptation to that model’s terms--the rise of neoliberalism, rather than the decline of Protestantism, much more easily connected with the narcissism, etc. that Todd describes.
Moreover, one should remember that the cultural changes that Todd treats as representative of the West have actually been highly divisive and controversial within the West, and not least the U.S.. If one can attend to, for example, the widening acceptance of gay marriage, one can also consider how in the culture war-torn U.S. the formidable religious right achieved the overturning of Roe vs. Wade in 2022, and has an unprecedented champion in the current Speaker of the House, two facts which quite suffice to make it appear that reports of the death of Protestantism have been "greatly exaggerated." So does it also seem to go in the economic sphere, where "economic Calvinism" also appears alive and well--not least in the endurance of the pieties about education (all too evident in the student debt load weighing upon the country's young and not so young), and the socioeconomic aspirationalism to which it bespeaks with all its associated values, including a tolerance for extreme difference of outcome (and perhaps also admiration for wealth as testimony to virtue) greatly exceeding anything to be seen anywhere else in the developed world.
Meanwhile if Todd is quite right that Russia's government has endeavored to accelerate the country's industrialization (or re-industrialization) I have yet to see much evidence for success in this area thus far. Certainly Russia has been very successful in sustaining and elevating its ammunition production. But what about, for instance, the production of the trucks needed to carry the ammunition to the guns? More broadly, what about output in areas like the machine tools needed for the industrial work? What I have been able to find does not support the claims for much progress here to date. Meanwhile, I am far from persuaded that deindustrialization suffices to explain the shortcomings in Western material support for the Ukrainian government relative to Russia's ability to back its own effort. (Todd emphasizes the problem of comparing the West and Russia on the basis of Gross Domestic Product--but when I undertook an in-depth comparison going beyond GDP to manufacturing value added and its medium and high-tech content; the physical output of key goods in steel, vehicles and microchips; and the production, consumption, import and export of machine tools; I found that NATO, and in certain areas even just the U.S. or even Germany by itself, possesses an enormous advantage, often by orders of magnitude.) Todd is quite right that, certainly to go by the contents of Vladimir Putin's speeches, the Russian government has brought the gender politics Todd discusses into its presentation of the war in Ukraine as a campaign against Western hegemony, but one may doubt the extent to which this is actually translating to meaningful advantage for Russia internationally. (This may be all the more the case in that, as Todd himself notes, Russia itself falls short of offering a full "counter-model" to what critics of this kind may see as the lacks of Western modernity, not least in the recovery of fertility rates in Russia still leaving it below replacement level.)
Finally I find myself more dubious than in a long time about Todd's reading regarding a Europe possibly going its own way. Where circa 2003 some (naively) imagined Europe being willing and able to follow a different path from a neoliberal- neoconservative U.S., European elites have proven thoroughly neoliberal and neoconservative themselves--all as the European project seems to have lost all popular enthusiasm (as Todd himself has remarked), arguably because of that neoliberal-neoconservative course (and, if one heeds Todd's argument, the deeper cultural changes that also make for an affinity between European and American elites). Along with how integrated their material interests were and remain (as in what Adam Tooze identifies as a trans-Atlantic banking system, in which U.S. bailout was indispensable to Europe's weathering the crisis of 2007-, or Germany's burgeoning trade with the U.S. and the surpluses it produces for that country, which in the past decade overtook Japan's), it is hard to see what motive Europe has to go its own way--all while, as Todd himself argued, Germany's weight is inseparable from its connection with those countries he called its "Russophobic satellites" in the Baltic region, another barrier to such accommodation. The result is that, if Todd has once again offered bold claims supported by some interesting arguments (based on a good many hard facts many prefer to skip over, like Western deindustrialization, Russian military-industrial successes, etc.), I am skeptical that his fundamental scenario--of a world scene transformed by a declining U.S. as Europe links hands with a resurgent Russia--will be borne out by the events of today any more than they were by the events of the early twenty-first century.
Todd has, in his discussions with his various interlocutors (and presumably in his book), continued to apply many of his established methods to recent events, and in the process extended old arguments. As was the case in After the Empire two decades ago, he argues for a United States whose power is overstated, as a result of a long (post-1965) decline in which deindustrialization under neoliberal policies has factored significantly, and the decay of its "soft" power with other countries amid changes in its values--with this given point by the country's involvement in conflicts abroad that bespeak both its policy elite's irrationality and its weakening practical military capacity; the rebound of a Russia supposedly on the verge of collapse, demographically and in other ways; and the prospect of Russia reaching an accommodation with Europe that, having suffered for following the U.S. in its path (in its own deindustrialization, for example), may assert itself newly as the United States weakens. In the course of making this argument Todd's remarks also seem consistent with his past work in premises, methodology and even his smaller conclusions, from his high stress on demographic data as an indicator of important social shifts, to the divergence between the U.S. and other countries in attitudes toward gender, to the decay of democracy in its old North Atlantic heartland as the U.S., Britain and France become more unequal and oligarchical. Indeed, this book much more recalls the Todd of twenty years ago than it does the Todd of ten years ago, when anxious about an increasingly powerful and dictatorial Germany's role in Europe he was prone to stress the community of values and interests between France and the Anglo-Saxon powers (the more in as it is specifically by way of such a Russo-German accommodation that there would be a Russo-European accommodation).
However, if much is familiar here (so much that some may be tempted to think Todd has simply refurbished old arguments), there is much that is different, and important. Todd, as one may have observed in his prior writing, has inclined to a view of modernity as being in crisis amid a collapse of fertility rates to below (often far below) replacement levels. (Indeed, it is with discussion of this crisis that he opens his prior Lineages of the Feminine.) And while he has been attentive to material factors here (in particular, criticizing neoliberalism as making it less and less possible for people with middle-class values and expectations to consider themselves in a position to properly bring up children), he also seems to think that there is as yet no solution precisely, and to have not just placed a greater stress than in his more geopolitically-oriented prior writing on gender, but a heavier one on religion (or at least, the traditional religious faith of the Western countries) than in the past. Indeed, Todd, for whom a major theme here is the state of Protestantism in those Western countries where it has long been the predominant religion (the U.S., Britain, Germany, the Scandinavian countries), has gone so far as to characterize his book as a "sequel" to Max Weber's classic study The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism--dealing with the consequences of the "death" of Protestantism as Weber did with those of its rise. Where in Todd's view in these countries Protestantism had for decades been only a "zombie religion" (in which belief in the religion's theology passes but respect for its moral guidance and values endures) he sees it as having since gone over to the "zero" state in their societies (where respect for the morals and values also goes, the religion gone from undead to dead), and correlating this with their attitudes toward gender (specifically the acceptance of "same-sex marriage," and acceptance of transgenderism). While Todd is not nostalgic for a more religious past, and pointedly acknowledges what he sees as the less happy side of this religious inheritance whose passing may be viewed as positive (as with an inegalitarian outlook that contributed to extreme forms of bigotry), he also sees Protestantism's passing as having played its part in American/Western economic decline, specifically through American/Western esteem for education, work and community integration passing along with it. Todd also sees the shift of Protestantism from the zombie to the zero state as more broadly contributing to a "nihilistic" cultural stance he sees as evident in U.S. cultural attitudes and foreign policy (narcissistic, destructive). In Todd's analysis all these merge in the combination of military conflict with "culture war," in which Russia has translated its conservative position into considerable soft power, alongside its recovering material strength, which he regards as being bolstered by a wartime import-substitution program making it a more, not less, dynamic modernizer and technological power, testimony to which is Russia's appearing more successful than the West in keeping its side supplied with ammunition. (In explaining this Todd stresses Russia's relatively very high output of trained engineers, reflective of a Communist stress on education, and especially education of this kind, whose benefits Russia continues to reap as the U.S. no longer does the benefits of its own, past, ethic, in this area.)
Altogether Todd gives us a lot to consider here, more than I think I can respond to all of as yet. Still, I admit that I have always found "hard," material, explanations far more satisfying than "soft" ideal or cultural ones for phenomena such as economic rise and decline. The result is that while it certainly seems to me fair to speak of deindustrialization; and even date the beginnings of U.S. decline here to about 1965 as he does; it also seems to me that this has had less to do with the decline of values, or educational failures emanating from any source (the cry that the country's problems are due to a shortage of STEM skills is an old racket too often treated uncritically), and much more to do with the exhaustion of the potentials of the post-World War II arrangements for sustaining a growing world economy, after which economic performance became more troubled and the arrangements unraveled (as seen with the beginning of the end of American manufacturing's long expansion and of the gold standard), with, to little surprise given the state of politics in the U.S. (the predominance of a conservative center ever more prepared to move right than left, the virtual non-existence of a left in an American discourse alongside the existence of a very powerful, reactionary, right, etc.), the country shifting rightwards, and in the process producing the neoliberal model as we know it. And if there have been changes in values, or at least behavior, the direction of change ran the opposite way, with the economic model the cause rather than the byproduct, as the proponents of a shift in model that had no popular base legitimized and encouraged adaptation to that model’s terms--the rise of neoliberalism, rather than the decline of Protestantism, much more easily connected with the narcissism, etc. that Todd describes.
Moreover, one should remember that the cultural changes that Todd treats as representative of the West have actually been highly divisive and controversial within the West, and not least the U.S.. If one can attend to, for example, the widening acceptance of gay marriage, one can also consider how in the culture war-torn U.S. the formidable religious right achieved the overturning of Roe vs. Wade in 2022, and has an unprecedented champion in the current Speaker of the House, two facts which quite suffice to make it appear that reports of the death of Protestantism have been "greatly exaggerated." So does it also seem to go in the economic sphere, where "economic Calvinism" also appears alive and well--not least in the endurance of the pieties about education (all too evident in the student debt load weighing upon the country's young and not so young), and the socioeconomic aspirationalism to which it bespeaks with all its associated values, including a tolerance for extreme difference of outcome (and perhaps also admiration for wealth as testimony to virtue) greatly exceeding anything to be seen anywhere else in the developed world.
Meanwhile if Todd is quite right that Russia's government has endeavored to accelerate the country's industrialization (or re-industrialization) I have yet to see much evidence for success in this area thus far. Certainly Russia has been very successful in sustaining and elevating its ammunition production. But what about, for instance, the production of the trucks needed to carry the ammunition to the guns? More broadly, what about output in areas like the machine tools needed for the industrial work? What I have been able to find does not support the claims for much progress here to date. Meanwhile, I am far from persuaded that deindustrialization suffices to explain the shortcomings in Western material support for the Ukrainian government relative to Russia's ability to back its own effort. (Todd emphasizes the problem of comparing the West and Russia on the basis of Gross Domestic Product--but when I undertook an in-depth comparison going beyond GDP to manufacturing value added and its medium and high-tech content; the physical output of key goods in steel, vehicles and microchips; and the production, consumption, import and export of machine tools; I found that NATO, and in certain areas even just the U.S. or even Germany by itself, possesses an enormous advantage, often by orders of magnitude.) Todd is quite right that, certainly to go by the contents of Vladimir Putin's speeches, the Russian government has brought the gender politics Todd discusses into its presentation of the war in Ukraine as a campaign against Western hegemony, but one may doubt the extent to which this is actually translating to meaningful advantage for Russia internationally. (This may be all the more the case in that, as Todd himself notes, Russia itself falls short of offering a full "counter-model" to what critics of this kind may see as the lacks of Western modernity, not least in the recovery of fertility rates in Russia still leaving it below replacement level.)
Finally I find myself more dubious than in a long time about Todd's reading regarding a Europe possibly going its own way. Where circa 2003 some (naively) imagined Europe being willing and able to follow a different path from a neoliberal- neoconservative U.S., European elites have proven thoroughly neoliberal and neoconservative themselves--all as the European project seems to have lost all popular enthusiasm (as Todd himself has remarked), arguably because of that neoliberal-neoconservative course (and, if one heeds Todd's argument, the deeper cultural changes that also make for an affinity between European and American elites). Along with how integrated their material interests were and remain (as in what Adam Tooze identifies as a trans-Atlantic banking system, in which U.S. bailout was indispensable to Europe's weathering the crisis of 2007-, or Germany's burgeoning trade with the U.S. and the surpluses it produces for that country, which in the past decade overtook Japan's), it is hard to see what motive Europe has to go its own way--all while, as Todd himself argued, Germany's weight is inseparable from its connection with those countries he called its "Russophobic satellites" in the Baltic region, another barrier to such accommodation. The result is that, if Todd has once again offered bold claims supported by some interesting arguments (based on a good many hard facts many prefer to skip over, like Western deindustrialization, Russian military-industrial successes, etc.), I am skeptical that his fundamental scenario--of a world scene transformed by a declining U.S. as Europe links hands with a resurgent Russia--will be borne out by the events of today any more than they were by the events of the early twenty-first century.
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