tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8746692.post8406164186342219938..comments2024-03-19T11:28:58.168-04:00Comments on History Unfolding: 80 Years AgoDavid Kaiserhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05020082243968071584noreply@blogger.comBlogger4125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8746692.post-89982204043537042122018-03-04T20:22:58.432-05:002018-03-04T20:22:58.432-05:00Professor
This is for Glaucon X:
I will give you a...Professor<br />This is for Glaucon X:<br />I will give you a title I like, if DK is willing to post it.<br /><br />It is not, however, a S & H cyclical crisis, so be aware.<br /><br />I would call it <br />The Crisis of the Age of the Democratic Revolution<br />or, as he has put it, it seems to me,<br />The End of the Age of the Enlightenment<br /><br />All the best Bozonhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/18078858723231122013noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8746692.post-72361532266963539532018-03-03T22:23:08.784-05:002018-03-03T22:23:08.784-05:00“The nation is in many ways better off than it was...“The nation is in many ways better off than it was in 1938...unemployment is much lower...wars are much smaller in scale today...no great power is about to provoke a crisis comparable to the one that Hitler was about to unleash…”<br /><br />So then, what then is the present day great crisis that you keep referring to? Could you at least give it a title that is as easy to recall as the Great Depression, the Civil War, or World War 2? If I’m going to go around tell my friends that my History professor says we are in a crisis as great as those, I’m going to need some serious evidence aren’t I? I’m going to need to say more than I don’t like Trump’s style, or that the Republicans are going to end New Deal government programs. If they can convince the people to agree with them, that’s called democracy, not crisis.<br />Gloucon Xhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05218027862578514587noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8746692.post-7922099216367437042018-03-03T10:18:57.408-05:002018-03-03T10:18:57.408-05:00Professor
Great post reprising several of your cl...Professor<br /><br />Great post reprising several of your classic topics.<br /><br /><br />I just want to touch on one or two, that of the Enlightenment, and of the idea of reason as an Enlightenment ideal.<br /><br /><br />"...The nature of this crisis, however, is very different. That last one, I believe, marked the climax of an heroic era in western and world history that began with the Enlightenment in the 17th and 18th centuries, and that revolved around the application of science and reason to human problems, largely through the medium of national states..." DK<br /><br /><br />By 1750 the ideal of reason, or science, frankly, within the Enlightenment, including the thinkers of 1776 here, had already been abandoned (at least by the thinkers) in favor of other, ultimately more bestial, ideas:<br /><br /><br />"Rational minds, however, or minds willing to invoke reason as the arbiter of their doubts, became fewer as the Age of Reason dissolved into an age of sentiment." Palmer, Catholics and Unbelievers, p 188.<br /><br />That was already happening around 1750 to 1760, before the American Rebellion, and well before the French Revolution.<br /><br /><br />All the best<br />Bozonhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/18078858723231122013noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8746692.post-86932961985830363262018-03-03T03:54:16.845-05:002018-03-03T03:54:16.845-05:00The old saw goes that those who forget the past ar...The old saw goes that those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it. Of course a Yogi Berra would slyly crack 'which past exactly'. If we just look at the 80 year cycle like the Fed, for example, then we will be worried about rising fascism, depression, trade wars. Those are very real dangers. However if we take the alternating 80 year cycle view, namely that one cycle builds up capital socially, 1780s which is then depleted by the next crisis and turns inward upon itself in 1860s then we should see that era and its newspapers as model for our judgements about what will occur. Germany for example controls Europe financially and politicallly over Brussels. So called fascists making their way into politics are fighting in all of Europe against a sclerotic nomenklatura of a consensus reality which has outlived its time. Bloggers write indepedently of this consensus elite, other media are lkke govt.. zombies of Soviet times. Taboo discussions are heard in parliaments which were practically as boring as Sunday mass. This perhaps reminds us of 1848 in Europe. An attempt at decentralization financially, politically, giving people a say in politics dominated by professional political class with a revolving door to industry and no interest in voters. So a sort of revolution is occuring, not 30s style rightwiing movement but middle class intellectual vigour is taking hold. In America the success of the post WWII system is wearing out just as constitutional system became ragged. Bretton Woods, reserve currency, international trade agreements, NATO, civil rights expansion, women and gay rights, secular consensus all reaching limits. In 1850s Westrn expansion and adoption of slavery/agriculture systm or industril/independent farmer system was main argument s well as central govt. control vs states rights, like in EU. America now has the basic argument of greater expansion abroad, as in post war Americanization of Europe, absorption into economic sphere and post cold war economic absorption of ex communist countries into WTO, NATO expansion. We seem to have hit limits there abroad with current political/military structures without active war except for skirmishes around edges. Save nuclear war, unthinkable, we are forced to turn inward. Americans argue the benefits of a neo-imperial system, protecting abroad for corporate and military production benefit, policing the world, allowing mass immigration, jobs exports, cheap chinese imports at expense of native borns, local production. Expennsive military, perpetual warfare everywhere against any enemy rearing its head in Africa, Asia, Near East does not build roads, educate children, guarantee middle class jobs, welfare. Pretending, as in Hollywood alien attack films that the USA is planet Earth and makes all decisions, 4% of population, is wearing thin. How do you lead world without a middle class, permanent civil, racial, cultural strife and always more indebted. The fundamental questoions is not the heroic 30s-40s questions of saving economy and world from evildoers(now funded by CIA so pentagon can fight them) but rather of saving ourselves from this mad urge to play superhero abroad while our wife and children starve in a dilapidated trailer park without sewage and running water overrun by stragers.Ed Boylehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/01753383765150492163noreply@blogger.com