“In this age, in this country, public sentiment is everything. With it, nothing can fail; against it, nothing can succeed. Whoever molds public sentiment goes deeper than he who enacts statutes, or pronounces judicial decisions.” — Abraham Lincoln
We are all imprisoned in the times in which we live.
Some of us are more imprisoned than others, to be sure, but each of us must make an accommodation with these narrative structures that define what is possible politically and economically. How to spot, assess, and thrive within one of these constructed ages is every bit what I’ve come to be obsessed with. We might call it a “mood” or even a “vibe” but that’s laziness. What even is a vibe? No, we must render the inexplicable compressed and understood if we are to have any hope at all of taming it. It’s not enough to have a subjective experience; it’s got to be made common if it has any ability to really have influence.
Analyzing a zeitgeist — or spirit of the age — whilst your living in it is tricky indeed. But a failure to take it seriously, is disaster.
The Germans have a word for how different animals perceive the world through their own sensory frame — umvelt. We can’t really perceive how the bees see the world. We see but a small bit of the electromagnetic spectrum, notwithstanding the penetrating insights of our technology. It’s our technical mastery that allows us to peer into all these hidden worlds around us.
We’re often encouraged to see things from another perspective and I suppose to some extent seeing things from the perspective of other animals might be a bit difficult for Americans who struggle with seeing the world from the perspective of other human beings.
And yet this ability to don other perspectives — to put ourselves in the place of other people — is not only deeply Christian but it’s also how we form real social progress and build empathy for other people.
There have been other attempts to “walk in someone else’s shoes” since the Golden Rule. To the extent that America has been successful it’s been its willingness to explore things from other perspectives. A multiplicity of perspectives makes it so that America can never really be reduced. As a Chinese spy friend once put it you can’t bribe everyone because the factions are always changing, shifting, resorting.
In our time of the Gaza genocide the reason Macklemore’s protest “Hind’s Hall” resonates so deeply are these lyrics.
What you willin' to risk? What you willin' to give?
What if you were in Gaza? What if those were your kids?
If the West was pretendin' that you didn't exist
You'd want the world to stand up and the students finally did, let's get it
It’s no secret that I’ve written a lot about sensory technology and that I’m an investor in using these new technologies to preserve the American way of life.
It’s my view that a sensor heavy world is a world free from organized crime and the various cons they run on the rest of us.
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When I considered writing about Seinfeld I realized just how pernicious “a show about nothing” really was. America was still here and to some extent you wonder if the nihilism of the era was, in fact, just a way of letting the organized crime world — the Russian and Chinese ones in particular — into a sleeping America.
Did America just substitute television, the Internet, and video games for opioids and fentanyl, something way harder? There will always be those who want to be numb, especially in a world of intense feelings and insights.
I’m thirty-five(!) and in my own life there have been two frames: The Cold War and September 11th, or as I like to call it, the Us Versus Them eras.
Ultimately, I suspect both the Cold War and the September 11th story served the interests of those who were neither really Us nor really Them. Neither America nor the Soviet Union were well served by a cold war. Neither America nor the Middle East were well served by a war on terror.
If the world is bifurcated between Us versus Them there will always be those who are appointed as middle men operating across those two worlds. Oftentimes these groups take on real power in their own right and wind up dominating the politics of both societies.
I’ve never really believed the conventional story about September 11th. Experience with Arabs has taught me that they don’t typically show up for things on time. Candidly I’m not brave enough to talk about that yet but I suspect elements within the Israeli state were all too glad to push through a Department of Homeland Security which they could and have grifted off of.
That model collapsed when President Biden courageously withdrew our troops from Afghanistan. The neocons are trying, in vain, to replace it with border security but the tech doesn’t work and the politics has shifted away from them. A Cold War II with China is similarly a bit preposterous. The Chinese just want resources; they don’t care how they get them. There’s no grand design here on the world; the Emperor just wants everyone to pay the Middle Kingdom tribute.
I’m with Gore Vidal on the futility of a “War on Terror.” “The war against terror is like the war against dandruff, I mean it's a metaphor. It doesn't mean anything,” said Vidal.
What’s the story for our time? Let’s hope it’s not AI.
To be sure, AI has replaced global warming, which, incidentally, all the servers are causing. There’s something deeply unsettling about AI and global warming occasioning the collapse of our society.
Both AI and global warming are anti-human and to some extent this makes sense. There’s a global baby dearth, which seems stubbornly resistant to policy.
There’s much Strum und Drang about that whole thing. To be honest I’m not one of those people who obsesses about a pro-natalist world view. There are lots of ways to create in the world and though I favor policies which would make it easier for families I don’t get particularly incensed one way or the other if people have large families or small ones or none at all. You never really know what’s going on in other peoples’ lives. From what little I understand the desire for large families in largely a genetic thing; you’ve either got—or you don’t.
Given the range of forces which are operating upon us at all times trying to make this cause or that grift the spirit of the age — I think we call this propaganda or marketing — I think what’s helpful is to form these things in your own mind and to decide what’s important to you.
For me it’s the caretaker approach — a servant’s heart. I think the model moving forward will be toward a custodial or caretaker world. Call it “planetary stewardship.” It’s a bit dated, to be sure, to talk about a small c christian stewardship sense of the world but I do happen to think it’s true.
It’s also helpful to sketch out the sort of planet you might bring about — sometimes quite literally by drawing it in a notebook.
I could envision a world in which every living thing is sequenced and archived in a great library for all time. With any luck, we will repurpose all these GPUs out and about and put them to work for the People and the natural world.