The great question;

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

In more modern times, we are accustomed to thinking of the wholesale collapse of civilization as a kind of process that produces Mad Max-style apocalyptic worlds of hardened scavengers preying on the weak. Yet our own "Modern Civilization" was itself built on the ashes of deliberately engineered collapses of various types of civilizations.

The most obvious example of this pattern, and one that generally escapes such analyses is the turnover of civilizations in the Americas. When adventurers of Latin-Catholic and English-Protestant persuasion arrived, the result for the locals was invariably a progressive set of civilizational collapses.

The combination of disease and being treated to the Arbeit Macht Frei form of social engineering produced a continual sequence of spiraling collapses that ultimately engulfed all of North and South America. The continual cycle of collapses produced civil war, ecological clusterfucks like the rise of the passenger pigeon, and the reduction of the local natives to impoverished minorities in a continent that was ruled for the benefit of an entirely other variety of civilization. The nightmarish aspect of this is that it's literally impossible to alter this process in a sense that meaningfully preserves the indigenous societies of the Americas but also leads to our world as we know it. This means, and I repeat this, that for our civilization to exist there was a process where two continents were pillaged and their inhabitants that survived reduced to third or fourth class citizens and this was and to a great degree must be perfectly acceptable. Modern "freedom" came at the price of an appalling cost too horrific for most people to consider, and one whose results can't exactly be undone, either.

Too, more modern times witnessed the collapse of some orders that were extremely ancient indeed. Such as the fall 101 years ago of a cultural-civilizational trend that dated from 2,200 years prior to a concept of staged progress to liberal democracy, replacing the Son of Heaven with the People's Republic. The Qing had been inheritors of an order that stretched back to long before the Roman Empire, fell overnight, and out of the violence and anarchism that emerged the result was the totalitarian structure that has become a Brezhnevite kleptocracy. The Japanese shogunate was equally ancient in the 19th Century, but it fell in its own violent and disordered process, and its fall ultimately led to a one-party state of conservative quasi-democratic elites committed to a more capitalist economic order, after ultimately producing a sequence of savage rampages through East and Southeast Asia. The tiny states bar the demesne of the Habsburg dynasty produced in 1648 unify in 1870, and the result was well......the subject of the next paragraph. In 1870 this order was by that point long established and traditional. In a short span of time, well......the shit hit a fan going at supersonic speed.

At the same time, our modern political structure in a more recent sense owes itself to the consecutive collapses of the established system produced by the two coalition wars of the first part of the 20th Century. A world that had constructed itself for centuries, one deeply and utterly and totally flawed fell apart at the seams when its modern states and social systems used that modernity to construct great charnel-house edifices. The pride and joy of the modern civilizations of the post-Napoleonic world order were used to create abbatoirs on a global scale, producing a sequence of further wars and a global contest for hegemony between a society led by the global Peggy Hill against the people that primarily did well because their ideas were not "Blood for the Blood God, Kill them all!". That the United States and Soviet Union were able at all to engage in such a global contest was the culmination of the steady degeneration of the old order.

One of my more controversial beliefs is that I think the idea of progress is a conceit engaged in by a few because it applies only to a few, and only in the sense of continually substituting one set of the few getting rich at the expense of the many for another. The difference between this view and that of the "Marxist" view of history as class struggle is that frankly I think Marxism is oversimplified dreck that neglects the immense amount of inefficiency, backstabbing, and waste that have always marked human politics. In this sense while it might be argued from a certain totally amoral and evil POV that the complete collapse and immense losses required to produce modern civilization are worth it due to those benefits, the reality is that no "progress" ever came without the most grim and evil processes needed to achieve its 'results."

To me the most salient aspect of all this is that whenever people wind up proposing some concept of the radical change, to leap from Sunday to Tuesday in three minutes, this cannot actually happen. Even when we tend to view things as producing actual, positive, meaningful change in practice for the people who experienced that the result was nightmarish chaos that only later saw some kind of "purpose/order" put on it to explain things. Too, while old, established orders often have real, deep, meaningful flaws humans again and again have proven that it can be astonishingly easy to shatter hoary old institutions, but damn near impossible to create new ones, to be a positive, animating force instead of a destructive, negative one.

Comments

[rasilio.livejournal.com]

Um perhaps you should start paying attention because you seem blind to the progress that has occurred.

Sure horrible thing happened in the past and our current world order is built on the ashes of previous orders, some of which were truely horrific, others merely different however...

How many countries still allow chattel slavery?
How many countries treat women as mere chattel (and even being a 2nd class citizen is better than being a piece of property)
Why has violence collapsed on a global scale? and most importantly...

Why has global poverty declined so significantly? (http://reason.com/blog/2012/03/29/steve-chapman-on-the-power-of-capitalism)


The fact is that by practically any measure you'd care to measure life has improved for those at the bottom of the socio-economic ladder by more in the last half century than throughout all of prior history combined and you just have to call that progress.

[johnny9fingers.livejournal.com]

It's good to see you back BTW…however, I think you miss lanker's point somewhat.

I see this mainly (though not only) as a critique of Trotskyism and the idea of Permanent Revolution: as in we can't "...leap from Sunday to Tuesday in three minutes."

And what you say is all true, but in terms of meaningful social institutions, we aren't exactly replacing the ones we destroy or those that have outlived their usefulness with something better. In fact, what changes we have made seem intent on diminishing whatever positive social structures we have left: rather than renewing them and leaving better in their place.

Sometimes this is good, othertimes not so much. Each case on its own merits.

However I will agree with lankers: we no longer care for society as much as we once did, or were once compelled to. Our loss, no doubt.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

1) None, but there are more illegal slaves now than there were at the height of the slave trade.

2) A good number of Middle Eastern US alllies whose autocracies are intact very much do.

3) The atomic bomb and more specifically the hydrogen bomb, which made violence short of total destruction unfeasible.

4) Capitalism really hasn't caused a decline of poverty in much of the world.

5) The argument against progress is not what you're arguing against, rather my argument is that it does no good to claim progress if 20 million people die and the whole become more impoverished to achieve it. In such cases the cost by far outweighs the gain. Especially as gains from this tend to be uneven and create more problems, without any appreciable number of solutions.

[rasilio.livejournal.com]

1) Wait, you're trying to make the case that there are more slaves today in an environment where slavery is illegal and all the slave needs to do is walk up to any cop and say "Help I'm being held as a slave against my will" to win their freedom than there ever were when it was an institutionalized sacrement?

You're going to have to come up with a whole lot of evidence to back that claim up.

2) Yes, 8 maybe 10 countries have laws or social customs that relegate women to effective slaves, out of something like 150 countries in the world. Compare that ratio to where it was 150 years ago

3) I'm not just talking about wars between major nation states. I am talking about across the board on a global scale incidence of violence has plummeted. Minor nation state wars are way down, armed rebellions are way down, murder is way down, rape, arson, torture, all way down from normal historical levels.

4) I would generally disagree with you here, however I know that you use an entirely different definition of the word Capitalism than I do. However, the point of that article was not to parrot the claim that Capitalism is the reason but to show evidence that poverty has unequivocally plummeted in the last few decades, the reason why this has happened is ultimately irrelevant to this discussion but possibly would be an interesting discussion in it's own right

5) Your argument only makes sense in the context of some mad Marxist or religious fundamentalist attempting to consciously and intentionally overthrow an established order to achieve some desired result. Generally speaking that is not how the world works and it is definitely not how we got to where we are today

No one said 500 years ago "Hey, lets go to those new lands Columbus found, kill all the natives and build this glorious new world order", no they said, "Hey those guys have gold and we want it", even at the height of the Manifest Destiny movement there wasn't really anyone with a grand scheme to remake the world into something new rather they were looking to expand what they already had and keep that going.

So yes I agree with you that intentionally toppling an established order even if it leads to a better result is a bad idea and will almost assuredly cause more problems that you solve and will always be immoral because the ends cannot justify the means, however your post completely ignores the fact that most cultural revolutions come about entirely on their own with no conscious input from any individual group or even meme and that regardless of the causes "Progress" has been largely democratized because the lives of the poor are better than they ever have been at any point in history, even when measured against the lives of their richer contemporaries.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

1) http://dawn-drupal.science.oregonstate.edu/facts

2) 150 years ago the civilized countries were far more organized about such discrimination than "primitive" societies were.

3) Even factoring in things like the Congo Wars?

4) My definition of capitalism tends to be grounded in real-world definitions, as is mine of Left-Right and a number of other vague terms which were ever-shifting.

5) Actually plenty of people said that then, Bartolome de Las Casas is notable for pretty much being one of the only ones that wasn't. The era of Magdeburg hardly promoted people who were squeamish about the fire and sword approach.

[sandwichwarrior.livejournal.com]

Even factoring in things like the Congo Wars?

The congo is an incredibally small portion of the human population as a whole.

On a per capita basis "Killed by a fellow human being" doesn't even break into the top ten causes of death world wide. Less than a 100 years ago it was number 4.

[sandwichwarrior.livejournal.com]

None, but there are more illegal slaves now than there were at the height of the slave trade.

Per Capita?

I find that hard to believe.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

Believe it:

http://www.csmonitor.com/2004/0901/p16s01-wogi.html

Here as in so many other things what we claim to have done is a far cry from what actually is.

[peamasii.livejournal.com]

I didn't read the OP as denying progress brought about by capitalism and technology. I read it more as stating a thesis that radicalizing society is never a step for progress, and that revolutions or war cause radical and violent changes which set back democracy and social progress by decades. In retrospect I think the OP would agree that while there is much injustice and poverty around, the progress of capitalism has reduced those factors by a fair amount, and that even marxists can see that, although they propose a world view which is not confirmed by historical events.

[rasilio.livejournal.com]

And I didn't mean to imply that Capitalism was the hero that saved the day, true the article I linked did (even though it did not do a good job of making that case) and I generally believe it is the best system (and by capitalism I mean real free market capitalism, not the Mercantilist corporatist bastard we live in today) but the goal of linking the article was to show that whatever the reason more has been done in the last handful of decades to lift the overwhelming mass of humanity out of abject poverty than through all of history combined.

[sandwichwarrior.livejournal.com]

In other words, whatever we're doing, it's working so don't mess with it.

[johnny9fingers.livejournal.com]

I think your argument points to the virtues of considered evolution rather than revolution. But I may be interpreting for my own pleasure and confirmation bias.

[Tips hat, anyway.]

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

To an extent, yes. The emphasis of this argument, however, is one that notes that most self-identified "progress" carries a staggering cost that directly undercuts most claims that it produces anything to the better. At some level the sheer gruesome repeating morass of a revolutionary change has to be factored into claims of its progress, not deliberately ignored for a selective, ideological approach.

[johnny9fingers.livejournal.com]

There tends to be a fertile period some three to five decades after a revolution has run its course. Something has to grow eventually after the sort of scorched-earth solutions that most revolutions use as social policy.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

This is the flip-side of Revolutions corroding existing infrastructure: they do so by processes that unleash a very fertile set of new ideas in the long term. However the circumstances that lead to a revolution in the first place make it more difficult to use them effectively.

[sophia-sadek.livejournal.com]

One of the problems we face is a delusion that what we find good for ourselves extends to others. I could not help but chuckle inside when I heard a man say that rich nations have a lower birth rate, so it would be good to make all nations rich. He had no idea that his own wealth prevented him from leading a more textured existence. Nor did he realize that his wealth derived from impoverishing others.

[dwer.livejournal.com]

Banana republics.

[vehemencet-t.livejournal.com]

This was quite a good post and on its own merits is very true.

But I am also trying to read behind the words to see the overall conclusion being suggested. I agree that any who think they will foment true revolution quickly are naive or deluded.

But I think your term "revolution" here encompasses more than I would consider truly revolutionary--it seems you include any significant change in world human processes within its scope, whereas I would say that events which simply transfer wealth and power to a new dominating class are not radical at all (they do not cut to the "root" of anything). Similarly those events which merely perpetrate such never ending senseless violence as to threaten the whole society are merely more of the same as has cropped up throughout history, not revolution.

On that topic though, something I, at a fundamental level, do support, many of its historical expressions have indeed either perpetrated or suffered atrocities. When they are the perpetrators, attacking innocents (who should be rights be the very people they are trying to "save"), they are obviously ideologically and ethically inexcusable. However, I think it can hardly be called the fault of them when, in retaliation for their determination to destroy an oppressive social order and replace it with something freer, forces in power perpetrate such atrocity upon them. I.E. in those cases it is true they did not bring about lasting change, because they were destroyed, but yet I do not feel comfortable condemning their efforts to try. Rather I think we should learn from them and their failures to improve our own struggles.

Isn't it true that sometimes those "hoary institutions" are really so oppressive, so entrenched and so powerful (i.e. they have so much concentrated power they can oppress an entire class rather than simply the individual power to oppress a few) and their destruction, provided it did not lead to further tyranny would be something to be lauded? But is the possibility of failure too great to support the attempt? I suppose the costs of failure (the slaughter of those attempting it) should give one pause, but what about the cost of leaving things as they are--the continued mechanical statistics of oppression and institutionalized slaughter. Which is worse? If enough intentioned people could struggle for the former, I think we would have our answer.