Then came Japanese colonization, WWII, partition, the Korean War, industrialization, and now we have Gangnam Style as the most popular video on You Tube, and South Korea is one of the most wired societies on the planet, while North Korea perpetuates the old Hermit Kingdom meme.
Old Korea could have been an example of a "senile" culture, sure of its own perfection and unwilling to change. A rather better analogy is "parasite load." There are a lot of parasite loads, but in this case, I'm thinking of the biological model, of how many parasites an animal host is carrying. Too many parasites will kill the host, and old Korea had an enormous parasite load. While I don't know much about North Korea, I'm willing to bet they've got a huge parasite load too.
Parasites, in this case, are those who make money without giving anything to society, rentiers who enrich themselves without giving back, artists without audiences who take public support, the disabled and dependent, and so on. I will say that parasites are inevitable, and societies that attempt to get rid of all their parasites cause far more problems than they fix. To reiterate, I'm not saying kill the poor, sick, elderly, odd, or even the rich: they're inevitable, and often they have important values that can't be expressed in monetary terms. Nonetheless, societies that spend most of their efforts supporting those parasites have a lot of trouble keeping food on everyone's table. Parasite loads have to be regulated to keep the whole system going.
One can easily make up a story about how a society with a heavy parasite load is "senile." Thing is, parasite infestations can be cured. Senility can't. The metaphor matters.
]]>Heh.
If I was going to play devil's advocate, I'd make a strong case that the English-speaking nations -- US, UK, Aus, possibly not NZ -- are senile. They switched from wealth creation to wealth consolidation a couple of generations back, and our younger generations -- those born after 1970 -- are doomed to be poorer than their parents, for the most part. Higher education is being priced out of availability for all but the rich and turned into an employer-credentials mill for the poor, driving debt; our macroeconomic climate is dominated by banks rather than producers: our legislators are either corporate yes-men or ineffectual dabblers who are unable to effect change. Oh, and in the name of fighting a war on an abstraction we have constructed a gulag that Stalin would have envied, and locked ourselves inside it.
(But I don't believe in cultural senility; it's warmed-over 1920s race theory, which is pretty much the benchmark for intellectual bankruptcy.)
]]>I don't believe in it myself because cultures collapse, for various reasons and in various ways with or without direct succesors. But Heteromeles original point seemed to preclude discussing culture this way; so I tried to fish up some examples of what he said could not be done or could not be done right in SF writing: writing of civilizations that don't progress or regress on a timecscale of millennia or more. Your discussion seems to bear that out because you can only really think in terms of a few generations. Eventually every culture either completely dies or sprouts new cultures from within or suffers external intervention. So the modern West is not going to remain senile anymore than Japan was going to remain detached from the world for more than a few centuries.
I like Against a Dark Background, but that civilization would probably have collapsed faster than it appears to be doing (or the species might have gone completely extinct.) It was still a cool thought experiment.
I thought Lovecraft's Old Ones civilization was actually cancerous. The material infrastructure of their society, the shoggoths, literally rebelled against them.
]]>We don't necessarily need to invent our ways out of problems. Often, application of what people (collectively) already know is sufficient. It's entirely possible that one day we'll know everything that's worth knowing (as in Brin's Uplift Universe) and life will simply go on from there.
The odd thing is that, for most human cultures, this state is the norm: you belong to a culture, it teaches you how to be a proper human, and you spend your creative energy not on inventing your way out of problems, but on solving problems using existing concepts and tools. This is actually the way most people work even now: they get their education, go off to work a career, and only innovate under extreme stress. That doesn't mean that they stop learning and getting better at what they do, but most people would rather not reinvent themselves, given a choice.
]]>The huge difference between now and the 1920s is that there are no threatening alternatives to Wall Street right now. Back in the 1920s and 1930s, there were major ideological threats from communism, anarchism, and fascism. Democracy seemed threatened both from without and within, and that seemed to have gotten Wall Street and Washington off their fat behinds to create the New Deal, simply to keep the US from going communist or fascist.
Currently, we don't have a major ideological threat to capitalism as currently practiced. Shari'a, terrorism, and the new anarchy aren't the existential threats that the first wave was. Ironically, that may be building a bigger crisis that happened the 1920s. We'll see.
]]>This is normal. When I got my PhD, for example, I was one of a few hundred experts in a very esoteric field that studied one of the most common organisms on the planet, something you've almost certainly never heard of. I no longer practice that field, and indeed the central technique I used are passe. Indeed, the entire field could be wiped out by a handful of stupid college presidents wanting to focus on, say, erectile dysfunction, at the expense of studying the most common things on the planet.
Much of our society runs on the backs of similar small coteries of specialists: nuclear engineers, those who maintain the internet backbone, power grids, run water distribution, sewage, or handle logistics for grocery stores, are all small groups of people. Kind of scary, isn't it?
One thing about the future is that inevitably disasters will happen, and we will lose those critical skills. I comment that this would be sort of like Motie cycles, but the truth is that our global civilization can crash, and in the fulness of time, it will crash, either due to its own failure (most likely) or due to a catastrophe like a supervolcano. I doubt this will cause the human species to go extinct, but if our distant descendents want to rebuild big cities, let alone global civilization, they will have to reacquire most of the esoteric urban infrastructural skills and sciences that we take for granted now.
I suspect that future human history may be a continual story of loss and reacquisition of these skills. Note that I'm not saying the future will look entirely like the past, any more than the Dark Age following the fall of Rome looked like the Bronze Dark Age that preceded it by about 1000 years. When the western empire fell, people didn't go back to working bronze, but they did desert the towns and latifundias. Archeologists have found similar cycles in the Andes (about a 500 year cycle, with 2 or 3 repeats before the Spanish hit) and the Mediterranean (a 300 year cycle of clustering into towns for protection, followed by expansion into the countryside as conditions became better), and there's no reason to think we're free of such cycles. The only difference is that now they may be global, whereas before they were regional.
In a real way, this harkens back to the old fantasies, such as the Hyborian Age, or Tolkien's ages of middle earth, or (yes) Lovecraft. What I'm suggesting is that the old masters got it backwards, and that cycles of growth and crash aren't just our past, they are our future as well.
]]>"That doesn't mean that they stop learning and getting better at what they do, but most people would rather not reinvent themselves, given a choice."
I've done it several times. I started my career in retail sales. I switched to administrative assistant. Then I became a graphic designer. From graphic designer I went into writing. In the US, I think it's more rare to stick with the same profession your entire life. However, that may be my personal bias because I have reinvented myself.
]]>I agree with you, by the way: I've invented myself more times than I care to remember, and I'm reinventing myself as a part-time writer right now.
The thing is, would you reinvent yourself if society gave you a role you were comfortable with? Say that you had a clean progression from child to student to functioning adult to master to elder to revered ancestor? Certainly, such a routine is impossibly constricting to some, but I'm pretty sure that most people would jump at the chance, especially if it offered the possibility of becoming a respected master of something they innately had some skill with.
Even now, the utopian dreams of many progressives are to give everyone a comfortable life doing stuff they're good at, not to dump everyone into unpredictable future where you have to reinvent yourself every few years because some dumbass in Washington, New York, or Beijing has just nuked the economy again, or some dumbass in Silicon Valley is getting his rocks off on making shiny addictive toys, and marketing them as the next great thing, so that we tap on glass screens to talk to people sitting next to us. Yes, that's a run-on, but I think it makes the point: reinvention isn't necessarily the most desirable thing. Sometimes it's necessary, is all.
]]>Back in the early nineties I was reading all this stuff about what was going on in Russia at that time and I saw it coming and thought it was a very bad thing to have happen. If only we had helped them end communism more gracefully.
In fact, I came up with a whole plan for how they could do it. My idea was that they should (1) set all property of the Soviet Union up as stock corporations, then (2) issue every citizen an equal amount of a new currency with which they could buy stock in those corporations (the only way to get the IPO). Afterward there would of course have been consolidation, but at least it would have been better than what actually happened.
Wrote it up in a letter to the editor of the school paper of the university I was attending at the time when a high Russian offical was visiting to make a speech or something, but they didn't print it.
]]>Speaking for myself, I get bored too easily--unless we're talking about writing. For some reason, I see endless permutations of areas of interest there. Of course, that's what mastery is about, right?
At the same time, we humans need varied experiences to be more whole. I'm not sure it's 100% possible to design such a system. Sure, stability is a good thing, but stagnation is not. As with many things, it's the balance not the extreme that is more desirable.
"Yes, that's a run-on, but I think it makes the point: reinvention isn't necessarily the most desirable thing. Sometimes it's necessary, is all."
I don't think I disagree with that.
]]>I think you are oversimplifying things here. Between "impossibly constricting" and "jump at the chance" there is quite a bit of room. I am comfortable with steady learning, and am very bad at "reinventing myself". Yet in my admittedly unscientific experience, even people of such mindset tend to get bored with what they do by the age of 40 or 50. Moreover, how do you know with what you have "innate skill" until you try it?
I am a software engineer, and am quite good at it. However, I also always liked biology, and relatively late in life discovered that I am very good at scuba diving. If I did not have all modern adult responsibilities, I would have gone back to college, gotten degree in marine biology, and embarked on another career. I did not do it, but would have if I could. And I know a lot of people my age who also would have liked SECOND career -- as opposed to "constant reinventing". Not sure how society should be structured to accomodate this.
]]>Personally, the longer people live I think the more we'll see second careers. My background being one of reinvention actually works for me as a writer. A large number of writers have backgrounds like mine, actually. We need experiences to build stories from. It seems to be how it works for a lot of people.
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