I have found myself in recent months wanting to have a conversation with the liberal that goes something like this:
"We need single-payer health care."
"So you believe that problems are best solved by force."
"Whaddya mean, racist? I just believe in health justice."
"Justice based on force?
"Look, I just believe that everyone has a right to decent health care."
"So do I."
"So let's do it, finally, and get the US into the 21st century."
"So the watchword of the 21st century for you is "force."
And so on.
Hey, I get it. The most delicious feeling in the world, apart from the look in the smiling eyes of the woman that loves you, is Genghis Khan's hurrah, stolen by Conan the Barbarian: "To crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentations of their women!"
Yeah, like the Khan's sack of Baghdad in 1258. In 1257 Baghdad was perhaps the jewel of the world. But not any more, not evermore:
Force, I think, is the axis on which the world turns: to force or not to force. The whole point of social animals is to create a hierarchy and/or a trust network in which force is not needed. This is a good thing, because force is expensive. See Baghdad, sack of. Or Imperial Russia, demolition of by Bolsheviks.
Or there is China. In 1800 the per-capita income of China was about $3 per day in today's dollars. By 1960 it was $0.50 per day, thanks to a century-long Time of Troubles. Hey, it looks like humans really do not do well when order breaks down and a general era of rape and plunder ensues.
So why is there so much force in human affairs? I'd say the answer is obvious. Used to be that the name of the game was having your own patch of food-growing land, and defending it against all comers. The world of agriculture seems to be something of a zero-sum game. Either you and yours have the food-growing land or you give it up to someone else.
But now things are different. That is because territory and food-growing are not very important. What matters is the ingenuity between peoples' ears and the use to which that ingenuity is put, backed up by the stored energy in "fossil" fuels and the like.
But we humans are still programmed to believe that the world is a zero-sum game, where you either get it or you lose it.
So why don't we all just get along?
The interesting thing is the bifurcation in world-views on this. On the one hand the left believes that War is Not The Answer and that nations should disarm. But the left also believes that cultural and political war within the bounds of the state is the meaning of life, and there is nothing better than firing racist scum and hearing the lamentation of their women on Twitter. Our lefty friends find it not to be endured that some people are sitting on unearned income and wealth and need to be forcibly separated from that wealth in order to sustain the lives of those traditionally marginalized and oppressed.
On the other hand the "right" believes that the market economy basically removes the need for a local civil war. Hey, real per-capita income has increased by 30 times in the last 200 years. Who needs force when the market is floating everyone's boats into the stratosphere? But in the international arena righties believe there is a need to keep bad actors under control with a muscular foreign policy and gunboats.
So everyone still believes in force. They just disagree about when force is appropriate.
But here is something I worry about. It seems clear to me that all living things need to live with a certain amount of stress and challenge. But where is the sweet spot? We know from settled science that the average man can handle about 100 days of military combat before he goes mad. We also know that the scions of rich families and the recipients of government welfare do not do too well in this world.
In other words, too much stress is bad. But so is too little stress.
Now, the most obvious stress for males, down the ages, has been the stress of defending the border. Is defending the border of, e.g., Apple against Chinese knockoffs, enough to keep men at a healthy level of stress, or is a deeper, more existential level of stress appropriate? Is there, in other words, no substitute for physical danger and adventure? I wonder about that.
The most obvious stress for women down the ages has been the physical terrors of the sexual union, the birth process, and the heart-ache of the loss of loved ones. Is a life where a woman can control her fertility, control her matrimonial status, and in which she does not lose one half of her children in the first year of life too easy?
You may laugh, but one of the interesting facets of modern life is that we all deplore the physical privations of life as recent as 200 years ago. We regard it as monstrous and unjust that humans should be subject to life-threatening stress.
But what happens to humans when we are released from the life-threatening stress of the ages?
The answer from history is: don't worry pal. Civilizations grow old and die, and that is the way of the world, whether we are talking about the Rape of Baghdad in 1258 or the Rape of North America in 1600-1900, or the Rape of Nanking in 1937, or the Rape of Weinstein in recent years.
Of course nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition. Our present civilization is different! Next stop, Mars.
And maybe blockchain technology will so enforce trust that no-one will be able to "defect" in the old way by cheating people.
But if there is one thing we have learned in the late, great revolution in physics, it is that everything is contingent, and even the lowliest quark doesn't know what it is going to do until its probability function collapses and an event happens.
Of course, all our modern political institutions were imagined back in the Newtonian era of deterministic billiard balls, and didn't imagine the radical uncertainty at the micro level we now take for granted.
So I guess we don't have a clue what is going to happen next, whether the lion will lie down with the lamb or eat it. And who is the lion and who the lamb.
Put it this way. In domestic life our liberal friends seem to think that nothing short of a totalitarian war on racists, sexists, and homophobes will save us from fascism. But what would be the point of that, lefties? Will it really bend the arc of history towards justice, or just twist it into a pretzel?
In global life we seem to be drifting into a War of the Hegemons between the US and a resurgent China. I see what is going on. China wants to the the next USA. But suppose the Chinese are missing the point and are setting themselves up for ruin, because the world has changed from 1945. How would we know?
"We need single-payer health care."
"So you believe that problems are best solved by force."
"Whaddya mean, racist? I just believe in health justice."
"Justice based on force?
"Look, I just believe that everyone has a right to decent health care."
"So do I."
"So let's do it, finally, and get the US into the 21st century."
"So the watchword of the 21st century for you is "force."
And so on.
Hey, I get it. The most delicious feeling in the world, apart from the look in the smiling eyes of the woman that loves you, is Genghis Khan's hurrah, stolen by Conan the Barbarian: "To crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentations of their women!"
Yeah, like the Khan's sack of Baghdad in 1258. In 1257 Baghdad was perhaps the jewel of the world. But not any more, not evermore:
Iraq in 1258 was very different from present day Iraq. Its agriculture was supported by canal networks thousands of years old. Baghdad was one of the most brilliant intellectual centers in the world. The Mongol destruction of Baghdad was a psychological blow from which Islam never recovered. With the sack of Baghdad, the intellectual flowering of Islam was snuffed out. Imagining the Athens of Pericles and Aristotle obliterated by a nuclear weapon begins to suggest the enormity of the blow. The Mongols filled in the irrigation canals and left Iraq too depopulated to restore them.Well, I guess the Mongols needed to teach the Abbasid Caliphate a lesson. Or something.
Force, I think, is the axis on which the world turns: to force or not to force. The whole point of social animals is to create a hierarchy and/or a trust network in which force is not needed. This is a good thing, because force is expensive. See Baghdad, sack of. Or Imperial Russia, demolition of by Bolsheviks.
Or there is China. In 1800 the per-capita income of China was about $3 per day in today's dollars. By 1960 it was $0.50 per day, thanks to a century-long Time of Troubles. Hey, it looks like humans really do not do well when order breaks down and a general era of rape and plunder ensues.
So why is there so much force in human affairs? I'd say the answer is obvious. Used to be that the name of the game was having your own patch of food-growing land, and defending it against all comers. The world of agriculture seems to be something of a zero-sum game. Either you and yours have the food-growing land or you give it up to someone else.
But now things are different. That is because territory and food-growing are not very important. What matters is the ingenuity between peoples' ears and the use to which that ingenuity is put, backed up by the stored energy in "fossil" fuels and the like.
But we humans are still programmed to believe that the world is a zero-sum game, where you either get it or you lose it.
So why don't we all just get along?
The interesting thing is the bifurcation in world-views on this. On the one hand the left believes that War is Not The Answer and that nations should disarm. But the left also believes that cultural and political war within the bounds of the state is the meaning of life, and there is nothing better than firing racist scum and hearing the lamentation of their women on Twitter. Our lefty friends find it not to be endured that some people are sitting on unearned income and wealth and need to be forcibly separated from that wealth in order to sustain the lives of those traditionally marginalized and oppressed.
On the other hand the "right" believes that the market economy basically removes the need for a local civil war. Hey, real per-capita income has increased by 30 times in the last 200 years. Who needs force when the market is floating everyone's boats into the stratosphere? But in the international arena righties believe there is a need to keep bad actors under control with a muscular foreign policy and gunboats.
So everyone still believes in force. They just disagree about when force is appropriate.
But here is something I worry about. It seems clear to me that all living things need to live with a certain amount of stress and challenge. But where is the sweet spot? We know from settled science that the average man can handle about 100 days of military combat before he goes mad. We also know that the scions of rich families and the recipients of government welfare do not do too well in this world.
In other words, too much stress is bad. But so is too little stress.
Now, the most obvious stress for males, down the ages, has been the stress of defending the border. Is defending the border of, e.g., Apple against Chinese knockoffs, enough to keep men at a healthy level of stress, or is a deeper, more existential level of stress appropriate? Is there, in other words, no substitute for physical danger and adventure? I wonder about that.
The most obvious stress for women down the ages has been the physical terrors of the sexual union, the birth process, and the heart-ache of the loss of loved ones. Is a life where a woman can control her fertility, control her matrimonial status, and in which she does not lose one half of her children in the first year of life too easy?
You may laugh, but one of the interesting facets of modern life is that we all deplore the physical privations of life as recent as 200 years ago. We regard it as monstrous and unjust that humans should be subject to life-threatening stress.
But what happens to humans when we are released from the life-threatening stress of the ages?
The answer from history is: don't worry pal. Civilizations grow old and die, and that is the way of the world, whether we are talking about the Rape of Baghdad in 1258 or the Rape of North America in 1600-1900, or the Rape of Nanking in 1937, or the Rape of Weinstein in recent years.
Of course nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition. Our present civilization is different! Next stop, Mars.
And maybe blockchain technology will so enforce trust that no-one will be able to "defect" in the old way by cheating people.
But if there is one thing we have learned in the late, great revolution in physics, it is that everything is contingent, and even the lowliest quark doesn't know what it is going to do until its probability function collapses and an event happens.
Of course, all our modern political institutions were imagined back in the Newtonian era of deterministic billiard balls, and didn't imagine the radical uncertainty at the micro level we now take for granted.
So I guess we don't have a clue what is going to happen next, whether the lion will lie down with the lamb or eat it. And who is the lion and who the lamb.
Put it this way. In domestic life our liberal friends seem to think that nothing short of a totalitarian war on racists, sexists, and homophobes will save us from fascism. But what would be the point of that, lefties? Will it really bend the arc of history towards justice, or just twist it into a pretzel?
In global life we seem to be drifting into a War of the Hegemons between the US and a resurgent China. I see what is going on. China wants to the the next USA. But suppose the Chinese are missing the point and are setting themselves up for ruin, because the world has changed from 1945. How would we know?
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