There comes a moment in the lives of most of us (thankfully, we almost all live long enough to experience this) when we discover that “it’s not just my kid that thinks of the events of my life as ancient history, it’s a whole lot of those folks out there!” When I think about the millennial generation (Net Generation, Gen Y, etc.), whose leading wave has seen its feet come ashore on the beach of “never trust anyone over thirty”, I reflect on the fact that between them and the trailing edge of Gen X about half the people on the street don’t share the experiences that I, as a boomer, found as formative. Considering, in turn, that the experiences of the 1930s and 1940s are as alien to me as those of the late 1960s and 1970s are to them, I can only conclude that Santayana’s aphorism about history and its repetition is about to be lived out again.
History as taught in schools has tended to fall into two main camps;
- Categorization via the periods of war, the reigns of rulers or some other means of treating the clock and calendar as a line punctuated by reference marks. This is not only generally a method that bores 90%+ of the class into intellectual sleep; anyone who turns an active mind to it immediately sees that broad historical strokes don’t nicely align with centuries and decades, the throne-spans of rulers, or the like (this is the problem in the philosophy of history, of periodization, and an underlying reason why Henry Ford claimed “History is Bunk”).
- The modern anti-historical method of taking an ideological stance (be it Marxist analysis, primacy of a nation-state, feminist theory, or many other forms) and “reading it back” into historical periods in order to establish clearly that they have nothing to teach us. This leaves the student with the clear notion that there is nothing history can contribute and thus a purely functional approach to current issues is defaulted to.
In history, there are significant events that warp the course of peoples. Al Qaeda’s attack on the United States on 11 September 2001, for instance, is one such. All the analysis and attempts to predict in the world did not and could not predict the exact timing, the exact form of the attack and the form the reaction would take. (Who, amongst us, would have predicted that a pioneering nation proud of its primacy would have turned its over 300 million citizens into people willing to give up their hard-won freedoms in a quavering desire for “security”? There are many others on this planet that that would have been a reasonable prediction for: the American people weren’t likely candidates. Yet others — including those who have also suffered attacks — have kept calm and carried on far better.
Yet winding through history as well are long-term processes that unfold. Most of these, unfortunately, are processes of positive feedback: in other words, they produce imbalances that intensify over time. These are the processes that end in a “tipping point”, one where there is a jump into the chaotic from a domain of apparent simple and comprehensible order. While societal innovation — what Toynbee in his A Study of History called the reaction of a creative minority who separate themselves from the conditions at hand to reinvent the process (in the realm of growth, this is Quigley’s [The Evolution of Civilizations] “creation of a new economic engine”) — is one response to the breakdown of order at a tipping point, the far more common one has been the emergence of “The Man on Horseback”, the “Leader” who takes charge and establishes a new order.
We are rife with metaphors for this moment of tipping: the collapse of the camel when one more strand of straw is added to his load; the avalanche that starts when one more snowflake is added to the snow pack on a mountain side; the collapse of a dune when one more grain of sand or small pebble is blown onto it. We remember those who step up to seize control after the collapse as well. Most signal a second slide (think of the Roman Empire once Augustus seized control and became Imperator, of the French Revolution when Napoléon seized control, of the seizing of power in Russia by Lenin and his faction, or the election of Hitler in Weimar Germany): what appears to go well at first decays into terminal collapse.
All of our policies have been designed to add, gram by gram, to the weight the system carries. Positive feedback processes about social welfare, life extension, correcting “injuries of the past” and many others have been wound around our society. For those who have taken on the responsibility of maintaining order in the world (originally the French, then the British, now the Americans) each in turn has reached a point where they are trapped, unable to abandon any outpost of power without opening up another point of weakness and yet unable to afford the cost of maintaining those outposts — and meanwhile, as none have achieved global order (despite global presence) new weak points constantly get added to the mix. (What else is a Somali coast or South China Sea pirate?, to name but one class of case.)
But there are limits to everything. I do not know (and neither does anyone else, despite their claims to the contrary) where the tipping points are. We can at best know two types of things: taken this far previously, this happened; and by experience, the process in its field of conditions is about “here”. That “field of conditions” is relevant: the shift from money as metal to money as a symbol of metal to money as a symbol, tout court, to money as the velocity of debt that unfolded throughout the twentieth and early twenty-first century is what has allowed us to be where we are today. At what point will the accumulated debt “grains of sand” collapse the dune and force the economy to reset at a much lower level of potential? We don’t know.
But we do know (by pattern recognition) that toward the end of a positive feedback process, just before it snaps (either under its own weight or via an external event) it grows rapidly — the exponential curve’s famous “hockey stick” moment.
Having destroyed much of the available investment capital in our society in the technology bubble (itself a creature of the transition to “money as velocity of debt”), and then followed that with attempts to continue to increase debt velocity in the face of the destruction of growth to pay off prior debts that led to the housing bubble (still unfolding, with a second US, UK and EU wave to come and a first major Canadian and Australian wave later this year?), we have now moved to the notion of government as the “spender of last resort”. But global demand for capital to buy the Treasury notes and bonds that, in turn, finance these deficits exceeds the available monies.
Will we see a series of dominos fall? (The domino theory, to return to the starting point of this little essay through history, was the rationale for Vietnam and Cambodia — as defining for the late 1960s and early 1970s as Iraq, Afghanistan [and likely Iran and Pakistan to come] are now — for years.) Or will there be a sudden collapse due to an external event that suddenly seizes all the debt markets and immobilizes them (as was Al Qaeda’s intention in 2001)?
Again, we don’t know — but we rest on the edge of a knife.
Meanwhile, the politics of our countries is rife with proposals for ever more deficit spending, ever more engineering of methods and results, and ever more ways to “set money aside” for a retirement no longer a part of employment (except for a select few) and thus dependent on highly liquid markets to extract wealth trapped in real estate or stocks, and the endless pumping up of growth. I would not be surprised that the next wave of change will either wipe out the tax status of retirement funds, or mandate that they be invested in the debt ponzi scheme now offered by our central banks and Treasuries worldwide, or both. Meanwhile our analogy to the hyperinflation of Weimar or the wiping out of assets in the transition from Czarist to Bolshevik Russia will be the traps that our mortgages, lines of credit and credit cards have become — all recourse instruments, and with escalating rates of interest to shield their rentier owners from a diminution in revenues — while taxes and fees accelerate upward, both to offset the overspending, and to pay for the “final programs” now being discussed by politicians anxious to buy one more vote.
We are, I fear, past the point of soft landings. A crash is coming, one it will be hard to rise from again. Governments will end up falling; much more of the world — including parts of it we consider “developed” — will become failed states or rigid dictatorships.
If this worries you, the time to act is now. Not next week, but now. We are but a few grains of sand away from the crisis.
On BBC World News this morning one of the lead stories was about China announcing their displeasure with a multi-billion dollar sale of US arms to Taiwan and a statement that Obama should under no circumstances meet with exiled Dali Lama. With China owning so much US debt and possessing the ability to punish economically it would be folly to dismiss this as nothing more than just grumblings. My sense is that they are beginning to flex their considerable economic muscle.
And true to form, the US has just sent warships and missiles to the Gulf to shield against Iran. They can’t afford the conflicts that they’re already involved with, why start another?
The tipping point you speak of may be much closer at hand the many people care to realize. Economically the West is a total basket case and those on the accention(sp?) are just waiting for their turn at the helm.
“Those on the ascension are just waiting their turn” — Bob, while this is true, I suspect that this is more than just another passing of the torch from one player to another (as in from the UK to the USA 1919-1945).
The addiction of “growth-itis” is a Western disease. It has taken stagnant societies elsewhere and given them the illusion of improvement.
But there is no distinction between technological modernization and Westernization (those who claim there is believe you can take the first without the second). Westernization, in turn, was the enmeshment of the other societies into our model.
Take us down, and they take themselves down hard on the heels of it.
Still, one of the great fallacies of humanity all the way back to the East African Rift Valley has been “it can’t happen here”. So we’ll see a lot of this sort of “I’ve now got the electrical leads and alligator clips clamped to your Western testicles” behaviour on the way down.
But the future belongs not to that kind of power, but the power of creating new (not just modified) ways of life.
This makes it imperative that we create the ‘new economic engine’. I would love to have your thoughts on what this could be, and I hope we can hear from others as well.
One side note: I think people worry far too much about China, I expect China’s growth to plateau at about 1/3 to 2/3 of US per capita GDP and India at 1/4 to 1/2 (there are some models behind this). I am aware that even with demogrpahic trends that will bring down population in both of these coutries over the century that this means they are likely to be larger economies than the US. Larger, but I would guess the US will be a much healthier and wealthier place for people to live.
I also think there’s far too much worry about China. But, alas, it is human, all too human, to fight the last war.
I should like to see a society of locality emerge, one where, as it starts to hit a scale limit, considers spawning daughter communities. This implies a far more “open licence” model for intellectual property (I think) and strong, emergent standards for components (from building materials on down) to allow for a great deal of experimentation, and reuse (since most experiments fail). The goal is to reach for “better”, not “bigger”. Success becomes internalized as continued improvement of the world around us and our interior lives, not “how much” you accumulate or control.
Economically this will look not dissimilar to a steady-state economy. We may well elect to provide many items in common rather than intermediate through a money economy.
Successful communities will waste little — the notion of the world as a place externalities are “dumped” goes into remission — and improvement is involved in capturing and using more of these (since we start from “here”) and/or reducing the cost to have and operate things. If it were a money economy, it would be somewhat deflationary — which is why money will be unlikely to circulate: it will be symbolic, yet not a part of the average person’s life from one day to the next.
As daughters are spun, this requires, in turn, that they “work their way up” the technologies as well to substitute for importation of them. This provides great scope for creativity.
Do I believe this will happen? It’s a low probability response, simply because the master symbolic understanding of the world in the West is “the projection of intention ad infinitum into the future”. This is why we have “growth” at our core — and why I expect we will crash and the West die out in order to make room for a society that can have as its master symbol “complementary cooperation” (or some such) that would underlie a prosperous, localized, open world of communities.
If the “new engine” does not appear and take effect widely in time — and time is running out — then the US will be no better a place to live (and much, much less healthy and wealthy) than anywhere else. The Dark Ages did not come with residual “good places” — all the good places were outside the collapsed Classical world. Since the West is now global, the Dark Age will be planetary as well…
Very interesting blog, Bruce, but it’s missing an important part of the equation: Generation Jones (between the Boomers and Generation X). Google Generation Jones, and you’ll see it’s gotten a ton of media attention, and many top commentators from many top publications and networks (Washington Post, Time magazine, NBC, Newsweek, ABC, etc.) now specifically use this term. In fact, the Associated Press’ annual Trend Report chose the Rise of Generation Jones as the #1 trend of 2009. Here’s a page with a good overview of recent media interest in GenJones: http://generationjones.com/2009latest.html
It is important to distinguish between the post-WWII demographic boom in births vs. the cultural generations born during that era. Generations are a function of the common formative experiences of its members, not the fertility rates of its parents. And most analysts now see generations as shorter (usually 10-15 years), partly because of the acceleration of culture. Many experts now believe it breaks down more or less this way:
DEMOGRAPHIC boom in babies: 1946-1964
Baby Boom GENERATION: 1942-1953
Generation Jones: 1954-1965
Generation X: 1966-1978
Thank you for this. I had not been following the early/late boomer split implied by “Jones” but it is, after some time to think about it, absolutely on the money. Indeed, the Joneses will not be keeping up!
Thanks for commenting; hope to see more of you.
I take little comfort in now knowing that I’m part of ‘Generation Jones’ but thank you gfr500 for the insight.
As far as China is concerned, I hope I’m totally wrong and they’ll see the wisdom of keeping the US in reasonable health so that the debt may be repaid.
Whats far more intriguing is discussion of what will replace the obsession with perpetual growth and the continuance of throwaway society.
In Natural Capitalism Paul Hawken describes the concept of manufacturers retaining responsibility/ownership of the products they create throughout their usable life cycle and ultimate transition (recycling) to products anew. Consumers no longer purchase a product, only the right to the service provided through its use for a specified period of time. Be it cars or washing machines, the manufacturer is responsible for maintaining, updating, and replacing product so that provision of service to the customer is uninterrupted. Responsibility for the disposal of all end of life product waste also rests with the manufacturer, which will strongly influence product designers to take into consideration ease of repair and re-usability. There are a small number of firms that are beginning to operate in this way, for example Interface (floor coverings).
The concept easily extends to other services such as the heating and cooling of commercial buildings, wherein the customer pays a set rate and its up the service provider to come up with the most cost effective way to maintain the desired temperature year round. Ideally, by getting involved at the design of phase of the building so that the internal layout can take advantage of natural lighting and HVAC systems can be optimized for the comfort and well being of the inhabitants (e.g. more natural light equals reduced heat generation by artificial lighting, a reduction in required cooling capacity and reduced absenteeism).