Just a brief warning: this is going to be one of those vaguely curmudgeonly posts. Kind of silly, obvious, and complaining, but I can't do much more about the tone and the content: it just needs to be expressed at the moment.
Anyway, it is comforting to turn away from current affairs and survey the turbulent movements of history, coming to terms with the longer arc of our species' troubled existence: yes we've crashed and burned many times in many lands, and yes we've survived and picked ourselves up to march on.
But it isn't long before one's attention is grabbed again by the increasingly loud cracks and sparks coming from this giant garbage fire of world affairs. For now my attention will be focused on the Western industrialized world, and in particular, you guessed it, the US, though the whole thing is looking pretty rough.
You could take your pick of a given grinding and recurring crisis: the pandemic, the mass shootings, the increasingly unstable relationship between ecological ruin and climate change and the fraying national infrastructure, the global brushfire wars, culminating now in the Ukraine crisis, and so on, and observe a painful grinding stasis which typifies it on a systemic level.
It is the stasis which is particularly striking to me at the moment, and what I'd like to focus on. At least, let's be clear that this stasis appears most forcefully in the West, and in the United States in particular, from my vantage point anyway, and its effects are most apparent in the regular operation of the established elite, affecting world affairs at a larger scale due to their unique hegemonic position. It is a stasis that grows ever more pointed as world affairs themselves undergo transformations ever more dramatic and dynamic.
To step back for a moment, you can look at the general project of civilization as a general complex of doing, and the reigning empires embedded in such a project are the complexes of doing that have settled into coherent and stable masses which have effectively leveraged their relationships with their environments and their global political communities, so that they can become fully themselves and export that particular form of doing throughout the land.
Throughout the tumultuous formative and then articulating phases of a civilization's lifespan, great wars - both global and domestic - are fought over who gets to do exactly what and how. The dominant hegemon that arises out of this mess must necessarily subordinate all of its rivals to a certain way of doing in order to solve that contradictory locality of its global character: the hegemon developed as a complex of doing in a certain time and place, and in situation to its particular context, and upon finding its methods favorable, enjoys the privilege of ceaselessly expanding beyond previous obstacles, dominating its rivals and forcing them to adopt its own methods and character, preferably so as to enrich itself . The wise hegemons allow their rivals to assimilate and enjoy their own local privileges, and perhaps some vestiges of their local character and method, but there is necessarily an overarching and shared "system," with the hegemon necessarily presiding at the top and ultimately determining those resource flows and the general direction of the overarching culture.
Even within the hegemon itself, the history of that entity is composed of a never-ending procession of vying individuals and organizations and dynasties looking to impose their own idiosyncratic modes of doing so as to make the greater society better at its own doing, gaining the universal acclaim and respect of having delivered value. We'll have to discuss value at length sometime, but now is not the time.
Surveying the historical struggles of ideological and active ambitious individuals, it is striking to see the thread that emerges over and over again: the intense need to advance the new and current and idiosyncratic way of doing things particular to a given individual or organization. The tumultuous processes of industrialization, the crisscrossing of the continent with vast transportation and communication networks, the military encirclement of the globe, the relentless hunting down and stamping out of diseases like small pox, tuberculosis, and polio, the vicious fighting over the primacy of economic systems, the voracious accumulation of research talent and technological capability, I could go on.
Yes, money and power are important ends, but those things are also means to affect the transformation of the world in the images of their wielders, and as a part of that process, elevate the wielders into a state of collective and historic deification.
What is so striking now in the West is to witness that process rapidly and dramatically diminishing and then beginning to shut down completely in real time. We see "everything should go back to the way it was," and "no it cannot be done," and "no such and such is impossible." We see cascading failure after failure and the complete inability to do anything about it, or the desire to do anything about it for that matter, beyond putting out the appropriate press releases and patting oneself and one's peers on the back for a job well done.
A job of course that shrinks back from the imagination and represents itself as the only way, but which itself is merely a decaying composite of past and dying ways of doing.
There is nevertheless a relentless striving in all directions, but which has cycled into repeat: stuck, broken, as it atomizes to the individual and within the individual, and which as a result, upon losing its coherent mass, has become impotent as a transformative force.
There is a striking advancing collective failure of will that can be directly witnessed and experienced, and even the images themselves are shattering at a more rapid and obvious pace; the propaganda can't keep up.
Us enthusiasts of history know all about that gradual shutting down of evolving artistic forms in pottery and architecture in the ancient world and elsewhere at other times, and the historical observations of the dying back of artistic and creative vigor in a given society. It is just so much more stranger to witness it unfold in real time, especially over questions of life and death that aren't even that long term anymore, or for that matter, too difficult to suss out in a rudimentary analysis.
