How AOC and the Rest are Getting it Wrong
American in a Time of Transformation
As younger people begin to get politically involved I am surprised by the lack of imagination that they are bringing to our politics and social problems. I should correct that, there are some wonderfully innovative solutions being brought to address social concerns, like providing socks or shoes for the impoverished. But we seem to lack imagination and vision when it comes to imagining the politics of the future.
Older adults like myself are mystified when younger people laud Bernie Sanders or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the socialist proposals they advocate. I am mystified, not because I am older, or because I lean right, but because I feel that I see nothing new. There are virtually no new philosophical ideas suitable to meet the technological and information boom that is taking place. We are faced with unparalleled change, far outstripping the industrial revolution and we have no working philosophies to help us think in new ways to govern and do business. The result is that some people default to an exaggerated vision of America past, while others grasp at failed Marxist ideas. People, is that all you got?!
If I have learned anything in my life time, it’s that you can’t go back. You can’t go back and reclaim the glory days of your youth. You can’t go back and relive your mistakes and correct them. You can’t go back and ameliorate your regret. You can only go forward, under new conditions, with new information, reconciling yourself to the present and planning new corrections. Our thinking presently is entirely retrograde.
The Future is Ideational
Signs that Western civilization is undergoing a massive sea change are all around us. The political upheaval, and the violence that comes with it, are evidence of this. Western culture is no longer predominantly Christian. Indeed, sometimes I feel that even the foundations of Western Civilization are crumbling beneath our feet. In fact, the underlying narrative by which we understand the world is being atomized. It seems that some believe that Western civilization is actually evil. But the ideas that they want to replace it with are the same ideas at the foundation of some of the worst episodes in the last 100 years! It seems that we do not know where we are in history.
Sociologist Pitirim Sorokin proposed that western civilization was moving from a Sensate to a Ideational world view every five hundred years. It has been five hundred years since the Reformation, since the last major change from an Ideational to a Sensate period. We’re due.
What did Sorokin mean by Ideational and Sensate? Sorokin believed, after studying changes from Ancient Greece and Rome to the time he wrote, that societies change as the value systems change. These systems do not die, but move from one phase to another. These phases are not absolute, but shift over time, where one becomes ascendant and the other diminishes. The Sensate was characterized by materialistic values — law, technology, science, rationalism. We are now moving into an Ideational age where mystical, religious, and ethical sensibilities will be ascendant, even while technology continues to advance.
Sadly, the transition from one super-system to another is typically marked by violence, war and conflict as these values battle it out for the future. But the fact remains, one is petering out and the other is gaining ascendance. Still, he believed these forces balance out, so that while there is conflict, there is also altruism. During the transition the Sensate phase becomes hedonistic, and ultimately declines into cynicism. Sound’s familiar? Need more proof?
Have you ever wondered why our battles around religion are becoming more intense? Why the questions of belief are more critical? Why materialism and individualism are being rejected? Why capitalism is increasingly interpreted as immoral? Why we worship gods dressed as supermen in tights in the movie theaters? I want you to think for a moment about how many movies have come out over the last ten to fifteen years that feature, in some way or another, a puzzle — a world or city-scape that keeps changing, a trap where we find our characters racing against time to move from one shifting cell to another while the whole landscape changes and rearranges itself. Movies like Dark City, the Cube, the Matrix, Aliens Vs Predator, or Inception come to mind. We are in a period of rapid change and we are searching for the path to the next configuration. What voices will emerge to provide a sane and genuinely good narrative that is redemptive? Let me repeat that; What voices will emerge to provide a sane and genuinely healthy narrative that is redemptive?
We are shifting into a new age and at a very deep and fundamental level. Unfortunately many of our institutions will be unable to lead the change. The social sciences and humanities departments of most universities are all married to post-modern and hyper-modern values, the last vestiges of a dying Sensate era. They cannot equip us for these changes, even as they believe they are heralding them in. Their values anticipate this ethical renewal while their political modalities are locked in systems that are at least 150 years old.
Christian Churches in the West are so married to empire and so entwined with culture that they have lost any prophetic edge. Many of them surrendered to the Sensate age decades ago — embracing rationalism and abandoning mystery, monasticism, and martyrdom. Yet even now new voices are emerging to herald in again the truth of the Christian message in compelling and culturally challenging ways. Monastic and ascetical values, virtually lost in the west, are beginning to reemerge. Liturgical worship and mystery are gaining ascendance.
I believe in the Constitution of the United States and believe its principles need to be enshrined in our hearts. There is something absolutely noble and good in it and in the ideas that pervade it. Ideas like liberty and justice for all. The free exercise of religion and speech. The rights of the individual and freedom. But it was also written at the height of the idealistic phase of the Sensate period, and at that time in history it landed on a certain kind of society — one that shared a Christian (albeit denominational) world-view. Our framers knew that without that underlying (and assumed) moral pact it would not survive. We have to face the fact that we are no longer a Christian society, and I do not think we can turn the clock back on that any time soon. As much as we cherish our past, we may have to reinvent it for the future.
The sad fact is that our manner of government and business have metastasized beyond what the framers of the constitution imagined and have inflated beyond measure. They are not built for the coming reformation as they operate today. We are not only suffering from big and out of control government, we are suffering from capitalist corporatism. In both of these cases more and more control is assumed by fewer and fewer people. What is coming will level all of the old institutions and ways of doing business. These changes will scramble the ways we govern and do business. The values must change.
Everything will be flattened
Not only is the meta-narrative of western civilization changing, technology is changing it in ways that would never have been imaginable. When we consider how we might develop new ways to interpret the world the interplay between technology and these new narratives require special consideration. As we return to more spiritual and ethical values technology will drive those deeper into the personal experience. We will experience a flattening of the world while it has the potential, if we navigate it well, to become more meaningful. Consider the following:
- Freely available information is already flattening the world and rapidly down-scaled technology, accessible to more and more people at lower prices, will make many corporations and manufacturers less necessary. For example 3D printing has the potential to flatten manufacturing as it becomes possible for one man to imagine, design, and construct machines in their home at a fraction of the cost that comes with the old manufacturing process. The internet will make it possible to order parts from anywhere to build anything. You could, in theory, design your own car, print the panels locally at a large-scale 3D printer, order the other parts and contract a local shop to assemble it for you. Boom! You have just bypassed the automobile industry.
- The idea that you need a university to give you information at the cost of one hundred and fifty thousand dollars is going to disappear as innovators use the information found through the internet to learn, grow and expand their own ideas. This is not a new idea, but it is becoming more real all the time. Why go to a university and carry a debt when you can get the information for free and show proficiency. We are entering the age of proficiency over diplomas.
- Millennials are beginning to make choices that are ordered more around “being” than doing. They would rather order their time around friends and experiences instead of a career. This plays well into a highly networked, node-vs-corporate office modality which would also have a flattening effect. They are ordered around sharing relationships and communities, not hierarchical ones, and they have Ideational values.
- A financial crash may necessitate the revival of local manufacturing. As the country recovers from a period of financial chaos and crisis we will discover that it is necessary to reignite the many manufacturing regions that were the engine of the industrial revolution in the 19th and 20th century. The difference is that they will be far more highly networked and innovative than ever, potentially making colossal corporations unnecessary and sharing values that are more egalitarian.
CAS as Philosophical model
Still, the aforementioned are not at the heart of the real revolution. I think there is still a new way of thinking that is only now beginning to be translated into philosophical models and are still far from percolating down to the common man or woman. As Complex Adaptive Systems (CAS)Theory begins to make its way into our social consciousness and begins to alter our models for everything from business to government, it will become clear that highly networked, smaller, local, self-organizing nodes of community and manufacturing are far more robust, resilient, and innovative than large corporations and large governments.
Those who hold on to the idea that Government is the answer to social problems are actually holding on to old assumptions, Sensate ones, the same ones that empower giant corporations to dominate domains of the marketplace or enable the government to squash innovation. Equally, those who hold on to the old ideas of the Republic are holding onto old assumptions that cannot work under current “power-inflated” conditions. Capitalism worked in the nineteenth century because it was innovative, localized, smaller, and was aided by an increasing network of communication through the telephone and roads. Smart corporations need to be adaptive and innovative, and they understand this. Governments, by design, are unable to do this well. The accretion of power into the hands of the few rob the whole social organism of the robust and dynamic adaptive power of self-organizing systems. The American system as it was founded lends itself to this networked modality.
For those of us who survive the next period of upheaval (which I think will be very messy and are usually accompanied by bloodshed), we may find ourselves in a world where people work from anywhere, manufacture locally and at home, grow locally and at home, and all along highly networked exchanges of information and ideas. In this future a government exists only to maintain infrastructure and defense as America becomes a more tribal place. Government can become nodal, networked, free, and informational. This, of course, also depends on a network free from undue influence. One that protects freedom of information and ideas and does not seek to control them or produce outcomes.
Based on the depth and breadth of social change coming upon us it seems utterly absurd to retreat to Marxist social and political theories that are 150 years old. It should be manifestly clear that these will be ill suited for the changes to come. What we need are new political theories that honor freedom, that draw from the best of our American Project, yields to the Ideational, and further explores political theories and social philosophies based on the power of complex adaptive systems with the promise of the free flow of information in a highly connected world.
And one final caveat, it is entirely possible that we will recover the American Constitutional ideal, not as a regression, but as a re-imagining consistent with the ideas given above. As Alexander Solzhenitsyn said in his 1978 Harvard address A World Split Apart,
“If the world has not come to its end, it has approached a major turn in history, equal in importance to the turn from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance. It will exact from us a spiritual upsurge: We shall have to rise to a new height of vision, to a new level of life where our physical nature will not be cursed as in the Middle Ages, but, even more importantly, our spiritual being will not be trampled upon as in the Modern era.
This ascension will be similar to climbing onto the next anthropologic stage. No one on earth has any other way left but — upward.”
Let us ascend!
Richard, M. (1977). Sorokin and Social Change. Social Science,52(2), 94–98. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/41886625
Harold O.J. Brown (1996) The Sensate Culture: Western Civilzation Between Chaos and Transformation
