Over the weekend, I received a very nice note from a reader — which I accepted from the fates as the best kind of birthday present — who was struck by a paragraph in a recent entry, “The 150.” Here is the paragraph that the reader quoted:

And I can see that we’re living in a crisis now, one that began with the first reliable steam engines nearly two centuries ago. This crisis has a dizzying variety of ramifications. One, obviously, is the lasting damage that we might have caused to the world we live in. Another is the increasing amount of labor that is performed by mechanical devices. A third is the state-change in human society that has been unfolding throughout the crisis, which has been marked by savage revolutions and unprecedented wars. Two hundred years ago, most people were illiterate farm workers. Now, most people have television sets. How does a society bear such transformation? It is so obviously much nicer to watch television than to plow a field that no one can be seriously expected to give the question the critical attention that it requires. That’s a fourth ramification. There’s no immediate payoff in understanding the crisis. There’s every human-nature reason to ignore it altogether. That’s why the crisis is met with general disregard, punctuated by dustballs of media-induced panic.

This was one of those passages that surprise me even as they seem to write themselves. I don’t want to suggest that I was unconscious while my fingers tapped out these sentences. But as I was concentrating on matters of diction and syntax, the actual ideas in the paragraph seemed to fall into place. There is nothing remarkable about any of them (however important they might be); it’s the putting them all together, as a collection of “ramifications,” that’s forceful — if I do say so myself. The reader commented,

It’s a heady distillation of so many profound discernments that I collected it for my quotes file… I don’t know what to do about it, but the integration of insights was powerful.

I don’t know what to do about it, either — about the crisis of the Industrial Revolution — but I believe that the way to begin is to organize its effects as comprehensively as possible, so that we can keep as much of the problem, what is to be done?, in our minds at one time as possible. This will prevent “solutions” that, addressing one aspect of the matter, make another worse. For example, we do not want to put an end to the degradation of the environment in a way that forces people back into lives of pre-industrial drudgery.

We also must begin with the understanding that nothing truly transformative is going to happen overnight, or possibly even within the lifetime of anyone currently breathing. We need what used to be called a plan of campaign. This military metaphor is not inapt; it recurs to a time when the most important thing for any warrior to know was the lay of the land. We have to plan for a somewhat distant future, and arguably the most important part of that plan must be to educate our children to educate themselves the better to advance the campaign. Instead of pouring the learning of the past into students’ heads, we ought to present it to students as raw material that might be re-engineered into steps and solutions. Certainly a great deal about what not to do can be learned from history, sociology, and psychology — three faces of humanism that regard our ambitions with a firm awareness of our limitations.

How did we get into this mess? How can it be that, a mere sixty-odd years ago, Americans were triumphant about mushrooming consumption? How did what looks like depredation now look like prosperity then? Where, for another example, did Pat Weaver (whose biography I should very much like to read) get the idea that television could be a medium of cultural fertility — and why was he wrong? (Was he? Or were his ideas never given the right chance?) How can we be sure that we understand things any better than our forebears did? Merely knowing where they were wrong does not put us right.

We begin with a lot of questions. But there’s also something that we know for certain: at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, no one suspected for an instant that human effort could conceivably alter the constitution of the planet. Aside from a small crew of atheists, everyone believed that the Earth was in God’s hands. Today, that view is confined to a small crew of believers. Everybody else knows that God is not going to keep us from wrecking everything.

***

Plans have a terrible reputation these days. Planning is associated with socialism, and few -isms are as discredited as socialism. Yet we require plans that work, and we need to work together to implement them: somehow, we need to think around the problems of planning and socialism to arrive at their objectives by different paths. We need plans that are less efficient and more open to feedback, something that, more than incidentally, calls for an entirely new job description and aptitude assessment for the people who administer them. We need a new way of looking at property, one that begins with accepting the fact that people like to “own” things, and to be materially rewarded for their efforts, but that doesn’t stop there. A great deal of property is owned by business corporations. What does this really mean? We need to drop the idea that shareholders own this property. Shareholders own shares, period. (We need to be Confucians: we need to rectify the names.) What is capitalism, exactly? I wonder sometimes if it actually exists.

Tell me what capitalism is. That’s what I’d like for my birthday.

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
This entry was posted on Monday, January 6th, 2014 at 12:31 pm.