An elderly individual’s perspective of his life and times. Integrating under the curve of a life as it approaches its asymptote

[Gavin]

@johnwalker

Perhaps what has happened, visible within my lifetime, is a loss of confidence in the very notion of progress

That loss of confidence in progress is indeed real & obvious … but it may be separate from (although related to) the modern loss of concern for the past & the future. One can believe that time is cyclic, but it is still obvious that each one of us individually is born (begins) and dies (ends). Cultures across the world seem to have recognized that cycle and shared a respect for the dead – such that archaeology has tended to be dominated by examination of burial sites. What is puzzling is that such concern for the dead within Western societies has obviously declined significantly within our lifetimes.

A possible test of whether this change is related to loss of confidence in progress rather than to the decline in religion: It would be interesting to compare attitudes within the decadent bureaucratized non-progressing West with someplace like South Korea or China where the positive changes within the last few decades have been staggering. Because of that progress, do they still retain more of a concept of continuity with past & future generations?

[civilwestman]

I’m not so sure the central issue is confidence in progress per se, but rather about our growing inability to live together in a tolerant society allowed to develop organically. Since the (ironically-named) “progressive” era, elites’ notions as how society ought to be organized and what beliefs (and words and thoughts) are acceptable in that regard, have diverged ever farther from ordinary citizens. Indeed, the very idea of citizenship has been abandoned in favor or a series of zero-sum games among groups; cynical artificial divisions have been created and fostered as substitutes for the old class warfare of Marx. This all serves to create an expanding dependent class beholden to elites - no longer elected officials, who are temporary compared to permanent techno/bureaucrats. Intentionally extirpated have been principles (formerly associated with religion, etymologically "to bind together) around which differing racial and ethnic groups with varying interests may nonetheless retain sufficient social cohesion to permit optimism for a stable economy and peaceable future society.

Much of the impetus for the OP was the intentional foreclosure of this peaceable possibility at the hands of “woke” elites. I can only see this as a hubristic work of evil in our times. As we have discussed, as with central bank digital currencies, these tyrants have many new tools of oppression and no principles of decency to guide them. They have no shortage of confidence in their own received wisdom.

[johnwalker]

@civilwestman

… these tyrants have many new tools of oppression and no principles of decency to guide them. They have no shortage of confidence in their own received wisdom.

What is ironic is that at the origin of the socialist / communist / anarchist movements (which were not at the time clearly distinguished and often overlapped) in the latter half of the 19th century, many of their founders and adherents were admirers of science and engineering and their accomplishments in mass production, construction, and efficiency through division of labour. They argued that the same principles of scientific rationalisation could and should be applied to society, replacing antiquated institutions passed down from antiquity, resulting in the same kind of improvements as had been achieved in the Industrial Revolution.

But what they failed to see is that the processes of science and engineering do not flow from theory down but from observation, trial and error, competition among different approaches, and incremental correction based upon experience. The would be social engineers were looking at the results of a long process and assuming they could jump directly there without the extended process of experimentation that produced those results.

Unfortunately, and often tragically, more than a century of failure does not seem to have taught them that it doesn’t work that way. Because of the local knowledge problem, the only way to make a large, complex system composed of intelligent actors who are always adjusting their behaviour based upon the evolution of the system is a distributed, organic, adaptive mechanism such as, for example, the free market in economics. Anything imposed from the top down will, before long, blow up because it will provoke unforeseen consequences and reactions that nullify its intentions.

What is dismaying is that this top-down approach has leaked from the realm of bad public policy into big science and big engineering, where what I’ve been calling the “cult of design” since the 1980s, where theory, untethered from experience and decoupled from feedback, has the arrogance to overrule the distributed wisdom and free choice of individuals.

At the same time, engineers building complex, distributed data networks and computer operating systems have learned from experience that top-down designs work poorly and do not scale gracefully, and that decision-making must be pushed down as close as possible to the transaction level just as it is in a free market. If only that experience and wisdom were able to percolate back into the realm of “public policy”.