I have a question.
Aug. 19th, 2014 03:01 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
avevale_intelligencerConsider the world for a moment. Not the planet, not the ecosystem; I'm talking about the human world as a whole, politics, economics, industry, technology, culture, art, all our societies moving forward into the future one day at a time.
How do you want to see it?
Do you want to see it as a confluence of vast impersonal forces, market forces, technological progress, social evolution, all rushing headlong from places we never knew toward goals we can't imagine, with us human flotsam just caught up in the currents and trying vainly to keep ourselves upright and afloat?
Or do you want to see the human world as composed of human beings, each one of us possessed of a degree of agency in our own sphere, in aggregate capable of determining our destiny and shaping the world the way we want it?
I can see the attraction of the first view. There's something exciting about being on a roller coaster, especially with no safety rails, or being caught up in white water and swept along. It gives people something they can secretly worship, a power bigger than themselves but influencing their lives just the way people used to think gods did. And, of course, it neatly exonerates anyone of personal responsibility for things that happen. You can't stand in the way of progress. Global economic forces are unstoppable. One must grow or die. The weak go to the wall. Nothing personal, it's just business.
But I have a sneaking fondness for the second view. The one that says there are no market forces, there is no tide of progress, those are just metaphors we made up and then put on an altar. What there is is us. We do things, or by inaction allow them to be done. CEOs of companies make choices which result in job losses and call it market forces. Politicians take kickbacks from lobbyists and then stand up and say there was nothing they could do, it was just economic progress. Fifty-two per cent of people don't bother to vote and say it's all just politics, what can you do. Metaphors. Weasel words. Excuses. We don't have time for that any more.
Given enough of us who know what's happening and agree, we can bend the market forces to our will. We can stop the Progress Bus before it goes over the cliff. It's not the tide. It's not a force of nature. It's nothing but us. The human world is us. If we're going to be a global economy, we have to act like one, globally. If jobs are being outsourced to other countries because the labour is cheaper there, then something global needs to be done about that so everyone in both countries can either have jobs, or live without them. Rich economies want their businesses to pay less for labour in poor economies, then the rich economies must support their citizens without demanding that they work for it. That's what the Universal Basic Income is really about, and it says something for human agency in the human world that anyone is even considering it.
We cannot allow ourselves to be ruled by metaphors. We're people. We are what's really here.
If we don't start acting like it, we're going to die.
How do you want to see it?
Do you want to see it as a confluence of vast impersonal forces, market forces, technological progress, social evolution, all rushing headlong from places we never knew toward goals we can't imagine, with us human flotsam just caught up in the currents and trying vainly to keep ourselves upright and afloat?
Or do you want to see the human world as composed of human beings, each one of us possessed of a degree of agency in our own sphere, in aggregate capable of determining our destiny and shaping the world the way we want it?
I can see the attraction of the first view. There's something exciting about being on a roller coaster, especially with no safety rails, or being caught up in white water and swept along. It gives people something they can secretly worship, a power bigger than themselves but influencing their lives just the way people used to think gods did. And, of course, it neatly exonerates anyone of personal responsibility for things that happen. You can't stand in the way of progress. Global economic forces are unstoppable. One must grow or die. The weak go to the wall. Nothing personal, it's just business.
But I have a sneaking fondness for the second view. The one that says there are no market forces, there is no tide of progress, those are just metaphors we made up and then put on an altar. What there is is us. We do things, or by inaction allow them to be done. CEOs of companies make choices which result in job losses and call it market forces. Politicians take kickbacks from lobbyists and then stand up and say there was nothing they could do, it was just economic progress. Fifty-two per cent of people don't bother to vote and say it's all just politics, what can you do. Metaphors. Weasel words. Excuses. We don't have time for that any more.
Given enough of us who know what's happening and agree, we can bend the market forces to our will. We can stop the Progress Bus before it goes over the cliff. It's not the tide. It's not a force of nature. It's nothing but us. The human world is us. If we're going to be a global economy, we have to act like one, globally. If jobs are being outsourced to other countries because the labour is cheaper there, then something global needs to be done about that so everyone in both countries can either have jobs, or live without them. Rich economies want their businesses to pay less for labour in poor economies, then the rich economies must support their citizens without demanding that they work for it. That's what the Universal Basic Income is really about, and it says something for human agency in the human world that anyone is even considering it.
We cannot allow ourselves to be ruled by metaphors. We're people. We are what's really here.
If we don't start acting like it, we're going to die.
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Both/And
Date: 2014-08-19 04:17 pm (UTC)*I* am one of the humans. Any assessment I have of the situation has to be biased because of that. This bias can be reasonable and appropriate; I find that it helps it to remain so to be conscious and deliberate about it.
Market forces exist and can be measured, much like tides. I-as-human can learn from the example of the possibly-mythical King Canute, and refrain from the foolishness of ordering the tides to retreat. If I don't like what the tides are doing, I-as-human can gather more humans and engineer a wall to hold them back.
Progress is a human-made abstraction, and is meaningless without an object: Progress *towards what*? *Goals* are human choices. I spent a lot of my time and energy working at setting good ones; took me half a century but I'm fairly pleased with my results.
We-*as-a-species* is an abstraction. *I* am an individual; I can speak as an *example* of my species, but not as its *representative*. I have received no such appointment.
Metaphors are tools. Craftsmen ruled by their tools do not generally do good work. Craftsmen who refuse to *use* their tools also do not generally do good work. Tools are to be used appropriately where they are instrumental in achieving the result the human exercising the craft desires.
I am, as you point out, really here. I'm *also* going to die. Don't like that (tried it once; it hurts a lot), but I'm not responsible for dying: when it's done with me, the Universe will let me know by killing me. No use wasting energy worrying about the inevitable.
I know what *my* primary goal is: To create an ultimate-to-me emergent social entity of which I can happily identify as a member. The words 'civilization', 'mie' (from Mandarin, translating roughly as 'uses our writing'), and 'meh' (from Mesopotamian, translating roughly as 'eats real food') have been proposed as labels for such an entity; none of them are dead-spot-on, but they'll collectively do as an arm-wave for the moment. The immediate *projects* I'm working on to *implement* that goal are five; I'll list 'em in my own LJ so as not to waste your space.
So what's yours?
best,
Joel
Re: Both/And
Date: 2014-08-19 08:06 pm (UTC)Yours is good, thoughtful and in no way simplistic, and raises some good questions of its own. I'm still not happy about the tides comparison; market forces can be controlled, have been and are being, just not by the people who make up the actual market.
I looked at your entry, and will read it more carefully and look up some of the terms before commenting.
Thank you.
Re: Both/And
Date: 2014-08-19 11:04 pm (UTC)I sense insufficient silliness in your life, and were you local would be tempted to bombard you with water-balloons. (It's 96F here at the moment.)
And I look forward to your comments.
best,
Joel
no subject
Date: 2014-08-19 05:08 pm (UTC)The vast, impersonal market forces are the aggregate result that all the individual humans make. Not all humans make the same choices, but if enough people decide "from today I will eat only vanilla ice cream" then the makers of ice cream will produce more vanilla.
But there are also an awful lot of people who like chocolate. Or butterscotch ripple.
People do determine their choices. What they can't determine is other people's choices (we saw a trivial example of this in the Hugo voting this year).