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.
Sunday, January 28, 2024
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 in its wake even the more advanced 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 in its wake even the more advanced 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.
Sunday, June 25, 2023
There is No Good Place to Be on a Warming Earth
As I have remarked time and again, a very large part of contemporary environmentalism--and certainly its more mainstream portion--has been founded on the darkest, most pessimistic Counter-Enlightenment thinking. Premised on postmodernism and Malthusianism; regarding the broad public as a "swinish multitude"; and denying any hope of positive social or political change; it screams about the danger--while being incapable of offering anything in the way of hope.
The result is that defeatism is all that is left to it, one expression of which is its haste to tell everyone that they are about to be dehoused. Live on a coastline? Sorry, you will just have to move. (They seem to especially love telling this to people in places like Miami and New Orleans--their "party town" image, perhaps, which proper Malthusians cannot possibly approve.) Live in an arid region? That's not going to be viable anymore. (The coastal folks have too much water, but they are going to have too little.) The tropics? Better find somewhere else to live. (Go north--to whatever isn't too coastal or too arid.) And this or that realization is followed up by images of latterday Volkerwanderung as millions, billions, relocate. However, anyone of even slight intelligence should be able to see that all of this quickly adds up to there being nowhere left to go--especially as unchecked global warming will mean that the situation will keep worsening, that the sea level will, for example, keep rising, so that areas that appeared safe at one point cease to be so not long after. And it cannot be any other way given that human reliance on freshwater supplies, productive farmland and water transport mean a continued collective dependence on areas particularly vulnerable to any worsening of the situation--while the losses of those areas will mean disruption going far beyond even the colossal human relocations. One would have more people living on far less of the Earth's surface, and getting along on far less of its resources, than they are now.
Meanwhile, how the world has dealt with its current refugee crisis, the worst since World War II but nothing next to the movements those speculating about such movements anticipate, does not inspire great confidence in the readiness of societies to accommodate the displaced on even a much smaller scale than they imagine.
All of this reveals this idea of vast relocations--especially in a world of hundreds of nation-states with all their borders--as the utmost silliness, though in fairness, I strongly suspect that were the troubles to run unchecked the frail international system, already bedeviled by what may be the greatest war danger in human history, would likely have long since escalated to the point of a devastating conflict before it comes to anything like forced mass relocation. (After all, problems like climate change, resource and economic stress, war, do not exist in separate compartments but are all complexly interlinked.)
All of this reminds us that if there is a solution to the problem it is exactly the one that misanthropic, technology- and progress-hating Malthusian-Luddite postmodernists completely reject, namely organization and technology to meet the crisis, with this not a matter of austerity-battered working people displaying great "convenient social virtue" in cheerfully deciding to individually live on less, but large-scale action to accelerate the "energy transition" and decarbonize transport and industry, hack the climate (they can whine all they like about cost and risk--the environmental movement's failures have left little choice but to bet on this route in some form), and minimize whatever damage is actually unavoidable (from slowing the melting of ice sheets to adapting coastal cities to higher sea levels, rather than some individual flight into an ever-shrinking and ever-poorer interior). Some of the technology we need to do all this is available; some exists in only the most nascent forms, and will have to be developed to a point of practical usefulness. Climate "inactivists" will look at acknowledgment of the latter fact and sneer at it as "unrealistic." (Sneering and calling things "unrealistic" are pretty much all that inactivists have in their intellectual arsenal of anti-democracy.) But in contrast with the fantasies of uprooting a planet's people and their life the idea that we can and should support the research and development of practical palliatives is the most pragmatic course--even when this means such exotica as cellular agriculture, or mega-engineering to slow the melting of glaciers.
The result is that defeatism is all that is left to it, one expression of which is its haste to tell everyone that they are about to be dehoused. Live on a coastline? Sorry, you will just have to move. (They seem to especially love telling this to people in places like Miami and New Orleans--their "party town" image, perhaps, which proper Malthusians cannot possibly approve.) Live in an arid region? That's not going to be viable anymore. (The coastal folks have too much water, but they are going to have too little.) The tropics? Better find somewhere else to live. (Go north--to whatever isn't too coastal or too arid.) And this or that realization is followed up by images of latterday Volkerwanderung as millions, billions, relocate. However, anyone of even slight intelligence should be able to see that all of this quickly adds up to there being nowhere left to go--especially as unchecked global warming will mean that the situation will keep worsening, that the sea level will, for example, keep rising, so that areas that appeared safe at one point cease to be so not long after. And it cannot be any other way given that human reliance on freshwater supplies, productive farmland and water transport mean a continued collective dependence on areas particularly vulnerable to any worsening of the situation--while the losses of those areas will mean disruption going far beyond even the colossal human relocations. One would have more people living on far less of the Earth's surface, and getting along on far less of its resources, than they are now.
Meanwhile, how the world has dealt with its current refugee crisis, the worst since World War II but nothing next to the movements those speculating about such movements anticipate, does not inspire great confidence in the readiness of societies to accommodate the displaced on even a much smaller scale than they imagine.
All of this reveals this idea of vast relocations--especially in a world of hundreds of nation-states with all their borders--as the utmost silliness, though in fairness, I strongly suspect that were the troubles to run unchecked the frail international system, already bedeviled by what may be the greatest war danger in human history, would likely have long since escalated to the point of a devastating conflict before it comes to anything like forced mass relocation. (After all, problems like climate change, resource and economic stress, war, do not exist in separate compartments but are all complexly interlinked.)
All of this reminds us that if there is a solution to the problem it is exactly the one that misanthropic, technology- and progress-hating Malthusian-Luddite postmodernists completely reject, namely organization and technology to meet the crisis, with this not a matter of austerity-battered working people displaying great "convenient social virtue" in cheerfully deciding to individually live on less, but large-scale action to accelerate the "energy transition" and decarbonize transport and industry, hack the climate (they can whine all they like about cost and risk--the environmental movement's failures have left little choice but to bet on this route in some form), and minimize whatever damage is actually unavoidable (from slowing the melting of ice sheets to adapting coastal cities to higher sea levels, rather than some individual flight into an ever-shrinking and ever-poorer interior). Some of the technology we need to do all this is available; some exists in only the most nascent forms, and will have to be developed to a point of practical usefulness. Climate "inactivists" will look at acknowledgment of the latter fact and sneer at it as "unrealistic." (Sneering and calling things "unrealistic" are pretty much all that inactivists have in their intellectual arsenal of anti-democracy.) But in contrast with the fantasies of uprooting a planet's people and their life the idea that we can and should support the research and development of practical palliatives is the most pragmatic course--even when this means such exotica as cellular agriculture, or mega-engineering to slow the melting of glaciers.
Deindustrialization in France
In his writing on France's contemporary troubles (and the contemporary troubles of the advanced industrial world more as well) Emmanuel Todd has had a good deal to say about deindustrialization.
Taking an interest in the issue I looked over the United Nations' time series' on manufacturing "value added" (i.e. net output).
If when considering the matter we see Germany and Japan as at one end of the spectrum (less obviously dynamic than they used to be, but still colossal producers), and Britain and Canada at the other (with their manufacturing output sharply contracted in recent decades), it seems that France is very much in the latter situation--and Todd rightly understanding this as an important factor in the country's well-known discontents.
Taking an interest in the issue I looked over the United Nations' time series' on manufacturing "value added" (i.e. net output).
If when considering the matter we see Germany and Japan as at one end of the spectrum (less obviously dynamic than they used to be, but still colossal producers), and Britain and Canada at the other (with their manufacturing output sharply contracted in recent decades), it seems that France is very much in the latter situation--and Todd rightly understanding this as an important factor in the country's well-known discontents.
David Graeber's "The Bully's Pulpit": Some Reflections
Some years ago David Graeber published a remarkable essay in The Baffler, "The Bully's Pulpit," in which, as an anthropologist, he examined the matter of bullying. In doing so Graeber himself admits that "[t]his is difficult stuff," and tells us that he does not "claim to understand it completely." Still, one of the essay's virtues is a fairly clear conception of what bullying involves--what separates it from other sorts of conflict or aggression, which might be reduced to three interrelated aspects:
1. A significant disparity in power between the bully and their victim. (People who are, in the ways that matter, equals, and know it, cannot be said to bully each other.)
2. The complicity of Authority in the bully's behavior--whether by "looking the other way," or tacitly approving their conduct.
3. The inability of the victim to respond to the bully through means which are both societally approved and effective--and the victim indeed condemned no matter what they do. The victim is unable to flee; and cannot respond to the bully in kind because of the disparity in power; and so is reduced to either ignoring the bullying, resisting ineffectively, or "fighting unfairly." If they ignore the bully (apt to be a painful and humiliating course) the bully escalates their abuse to the point at which they cannot ignore it; if they resist ineffectively they demonstrate that they are weak, and are held in contempt for being weak; and if they resort to something unconventional they are held in contempt for that, too, and likely to be punished as everyone rallies around the bully.
Sanctimoniousness is thus a hallmark of such situations.
In Graeber's analysis the third aspect, the victim's reaction, and the sanctimoniousness toward it, is the point, "[b]ullying creat[ing] a moral drama in which the manner of the victim’s reaction to an act of aggression can be used as retrospective justification for the original act of aggression itself." Putting it another way, central to bullying is propagandizing for the view that the oppressed deserve to be so. (Thus do they abuse someone past the limits of their endurance, and then when they lash out, say "Evil, evil, evil! That's why we have to keep their kind down.")
It is absolutely vile, and I might add, vile in a particular way. While Graeber remarked his having not read Veblen some time after this piece was published, it seems to me that such ritual is yet another reminder of the endurance of what Thorstein Veblen identified as barbarism into our times--with the pervasiveness and severity of such ritual, and the tolerance of it and justification of it, very telling of how much such barbarism lingers in a particular society.
1. A significant disparity in power between the bully and their victim. (People who are, in the ways that matter, equals, and know it, cannot be said to bully each other.)
2. The complicity of Authority in the bully's behavior--whether by "looking the other way," or tacitly approving their conduct.
3. The inability of the victim to respond to the bully through means which are both societally approved and effective--and the victim indeed condemned no matter what they do. The victim is unable to flee; and cannot respond to the bully in kind because of the disparity in power; and so is reduced to either ignoring the bullying, resisting ineffectively, or "fighting unfairly." If they ignore the bully (apt to be a painful and humiliating course) the bully escalates their abuse to the point at which they cannot ignore it; if they resist ineffectively they demonstrate that they are weak, and are held in contempt for being weak; and if they resort to something unconventional they are held in contempt for that, too, and likely to be punished as everyone rallies around the bully.
Sanctimoniousness is thus a hallmark of such situations.
In Graeber's analysis the third aspect, the victim's reaction, and the sanctimoniousness toward it, is the point, "[b]ullying creat[ing] a moral drama in which the manner of the victim’s reaction to an act of aggression can be used as retrospective justification for the original act of aggression itself." Putting it another way, central to bullying is propagandizing for the view that the oppressed deserve to be so. (Thus do they abuse someone past the limits of their endurance, and then when they lash out, say "Evil, evil, evil! That's why we have to keep their kind down.")
It is absolutely vile, and I might add, vile in a particular way. While Graeber remarked his having not read Veblen some time after this piece was published, it seems to me that such ritual is yet another reminder of the endurance of what Thorstein Veblen identified as barbarism into our times--with the pervasiveness and severity of such ritual, and the tolerance of it and justification of it, very telling of how much such barbarism lingers in a particular society.
Fifth Generation Computing: A Reappraisal
Back in April 2022 I published here a brief item about Japan's generally unremembered Fifth Generation Computer Systems Initiative from the standpoint of that initiative's fortieth anniversary (which fell on that very month).
Much hyped at the time, it was supposed to deliver the kind of artificial intelligence toward which we generally still felt ourselves to be straining at that time.
Writing that item my principal thought was for the overblown expectations people had of the program. However, in the wake of more recent work on Large Language Models, like OpenAI's GPT-4, it seems that something of what the fifth-generation computing program's proponents anticipated is at the least starting to become a reality.
It also seems notable that even if fourth-generation computing has not been replaced by fundamentally new hardware, or even shifted the material substrate of the same fourth-generation design from silicon to another material (like the long hoped-for carbon nanotube), we have seen a different chip concept--employed in a specialty capacity rather than as a replacement for fourth-generation computing--play a key role in progress in this field, "AI" (Artificial Intelligence) chips. Indeed, just as anticipated by those who had watched the fifth-generation computing program's development, parallel processing has been critical to the design of these chips for "pattern recognition," and the acceleration of the programs' training.
In the wake of all that, rather than regarding fifth-generation computing as a historical curiosity one may see grounds for it simply having been ahead of its time--and deserving of more respect than it has had to date. Indeed, it may well be that somewhere in the generally overlooked body of research produced in the course of its development there are insights that could power our continued progress in this field.
Much hyped at the time, it was supposed to deliver the kind of artificial intelligence toward which we generally still felt ourselves to be straining at that time.
Writing that item my principal thought was for the overblown expectations people had of the program. However, in the wake of more recent work on Large Language Models, like OpenAI's GPT-4, it seems that something of what the fifth-generation computing program's proponents anticipated is at the least starting to become a reality.
It also seems notable that even if fourth-generation computing has not been replaced by fundamentally new hardware, or even shifted the material substrate of the same fourth-generation design from silicon to another material (like the long hoped-for carbon nanotube), we have seen a different chip concept--employed in a specialty capacity rather than as a replacement for fourth-generation computing--play a key role in progress in this field, "AI" (Artificial Intelligence) chips. Indeed, just as anticipated by those who had watched the fifth-generation computing program's development, parallel processing has been critical to the design of these chips for "pattern recognition," and the acceleration of the programs' training.
In the wake of all that, rather than regarding fifth-generation computing as a historical curiosity one may see grounds for it simply having been ahead of its time--and deserving of more respect than it has had to date. Indeed, it may well be that somewhere in the generally overlooked body of research produced in the course of its development there are insights that could power our continued progress in this field.
Of Left and Right Transhumanism, Again
About a decade ago I had occasion to remark that while transhumanist thought may be said to have been more evident on the left than the right a century ago the existence of left transhumanism scarcely seems a memory where the mainstream is concerned today. This is arguably because of how completely the left has been cut out of the conversation--the bounds of "civil" discourse set by the centrism predominant at mid-century locking it out, and nothing changing that ever since (the left, indeed, coming to be more thoroughly excluded as the "center," deeply conservative from the start, only shifted rightward). However, there also seems little sign of interest in the matter these days on the left.
Why is that?
It may be that in a period like the 1920s, when many on the left felt confident that the future belonged to them, there appeared room for such visions--such that Leon Trotsky, for example, could be seen waxing transhumanist in the seemingly unlikely place for such that is the closing pages of his book Literature and Revolution. By contrast, after decades of catastrophic, bitter political defeat and disappointment (without which the aforementioned marginalization of the left to the degree seen today would not have been possible), the feeling can only be very different--with other issues far more pressing, leaving little time or energy for such concerns. It may even be that, so long accused of being "visionary," with anti-Communist cliché endlessly sneering at the left's claims to rationality and mocking it as a quasi-religion, those on the left hesitate to give their enemies any more ammunition by taking up such concerns as transhumanism.
Of course, were the issue of transhumanism to become more pressing this would change. Some claim that it already has in the wake of recent developments in the field of artificial intelligence, with one team of Microsoft researchers, who strike this author as having been rigorous in their assessment and cautious in their analysis of the new GPT-4 (certainly by the standard of a discourse which seems to think "What sorcery is this?" an intelligent response) suggesting that Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), in however "early" and "incomplete" a form, may already be a reality. Considering their assessment I am inclined to emphasize the "early" and "incomplete" in their judgment--and to suggest that the developments and additions to actually turn what may be early and incomplete AGI into an undeniably complete and mature system (like the system's being equipped with elaborate planning-oriented and self-critical "slow thinking" as well as the "fast thinking" faculties that have so impressed observers, and its being modified so as to learn continually and retain what it learns via a long-term memory facility) may be a long way off. All the same, the extent to which people of ideological tendencies which have not felt the need to address these matters find themselves having to do so may be telling with regard to just how much these new developments really matter.
Why is that?
It may be that in a period like the 1920s, when many on the left felt confident that the future belonged to them, there appeared room for such visions--such that Leon Trotsky, for example, could be seen waxing transhumanist in the seemingly unlikely place for such that is the closing pages of his book Literature and Revolution. By contrast, after decades of catastrophic, bitter political defeat and disappointment (without which the aforementioned marginalization of the left to the degree seen today would not have been possible), the feeling can only be very different--with other issues far more pressing, leaving little time or energy for such concerns. It may even be that, so long accused of being "visionary," with anti-Communist cliché endlessly sneering at the left's claims to rationality and mocking it as a quasi-religion, those on the left hesitate to give their enemies any more ammunition by taking up such concerns as transhumanism.
Of course, were the issue of transhumanism to become more pressing this would change. Some claim that it already has in the wake of recent developments in the field of artificial intelligence, with one team of Microsoft researchers, who strike this author as having been rigorous in their assessment and cautious in their analysis of the new GPT-4 (certainly by the standard of a discourse which seems to think "What sorcery is this?" an intelligent response) suggesting that Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), in however "early" and "incomplete" a form, may already be a reality. Considering their assessment I am inclined to emphasize the "early" and "incomplete" in their judgment--and to suggest that the developments and additions to actually turn what may be early and incomplete AGI into an undeniably complete and mature system (like the system's being equipped with elaborate planning-oriented and self-critical "slow thinking" as well as the "fast thinking" faculties that have so impressed observers, and its being modified so as to learn continually and retain what it learns via a long-term memory facility) may be a long way off. All the same, the extent to which people of ideological tendencies which have not felt the need to address these matters find themselves having to do so may be telling with regard to just how much these new developments really matter.
Will AI Puncture the College Degree Bubble?
Some time ago I wrote about the possibility that college degrees had become the object of an asset bubble-like pursuit, with the price of the "asset" increasingly detached from the value of the good amid increasingly irrational buying--facilitated, as bubbles often are, by burgeoning credit (the more in as student loan generators securitize the debt, providing other money-making opportunities).
The bubble has "inflated" to far greater proportions than onlookers had imagined possible--but it seems that amid harder times and much disappointment, this may be coming to an end as young people become more reticent about the time and money college requires, encouraged to some extent by the changing tone of the press. Ever inclined to the promotion of aspirationalism rather than egalitarianism, its cry of "STEM! STEM! STEM!" has given way to its suggesting young people consider becoming electricians.
Just as much as was the case with the earlier counsel of "Go to college, young man" the "Go to trade school, young man" advice can reflect any number of agendas (like cover for financial austerity that would make college less accessible), but part of it may also be the increasing acknowledgment of the simple-mindedness of the "Send everyone to college" mentality--the more in as so many fear now that when the "AI" come for people's jobs it will be the knowledge workers who lose their jobs first, as, far from truckers having to learn to code, out-of-work coders start thinking about getting trucker's licenses.
The bubble has "inflated" to far greater proportions than onlookers had imagined possible--but it seems that amid harder times and much disappointment, this may be coming to an end as young people become more reticent about the time and money college requires, encouraged to some extent by the changing tone of the press. Ever inclined to the promotion of aspirationalism rather than egalitarianism, its cry of "STEM! STEM! STEM!" has given way to its suggesting young people consider becoming electricians.
Just as much as was the case with the earlier counsel of "Go to college, young man" the "Go to trade school, young man" advice can reflect any number of agendas (like cover for financial austerity that would make college less accessible), but part of it may also be the increasing acknowledgment of the simple-mindedness of the "Send everyone to college" mentality--the more in as so many fear now that when the "AI" come for people's jobs it will be the knowledge workers who lose their jobs first, as, far from truckers having to learn to code, out-of-work coders start thinking about getting trucker's licenses.
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