Monday, February 14, 2005

I have been reading Christopher Lasch's great history of social change in America, The True and Only America . One theme of the book is that critics of change since the founding fathers continually saw what was negatively happening and it made no difference. There  emerged a kind of iron law of industrialization in our social theorizing, the capitalist version of Marxist historical determinism, saying the split between workers and owners was inevitable But craft and skill baed owndership of the tools of experize used to be owned by artisans.. Now the information age has replaced fixed hierarchies with floating ones and there is an amazing opportunity to reinvent ourselves.   In the early days of commerce , late 1700's,  people saw the problem of strength and virtue sapping  luxury but believed also that it supported individual development and initiative. The idea that there were excesses was lost quickly, and later, as commerce became in fact  an exchange between corporations, the idea that it was individual development was also lost.   We need to look at the organizations of work and property in the United States and how they weaved all together. This is really the history from 1800 through the Civil War to 1900.  The country started with a combination of large (with slaves) and small farms and artists and craftsmen. The development of technology, simple things like sharper tools and the first small machinery, started a kind of industrialization that required wage labor. Failing farmers and new immigrants provided it. This led to a great struggle of the artisans against the power of industries, using borrowed money from banks, to create increasingly powerful factory systems. The professional rise of management and the need for a large number of intermediaries in the industrial system supported the growth of a large middle class. It carried us into and through a number of wars which solidified the power of bureaucracy and its connection to the world of corporations. Information technology is tending both to make life easier for capital but also easier for workers to find identities outside of their corporations. The resulting flux means everything is floating and there's a great deal of insecurity. But there is also opportunity for the creation of new social forms that take us back to rethinking their relationships between work and property, capital and ownership, homes and families. Education and the richness of individual human lives.   ** In a conference on climate change, I saw some usefulnes to the analysis of what happened with Y2k.   Can society solve a major problem?   A few years ago I got very involved in nY2K. What fascinated me was that people had their mind made up, big deal or not, without evidence. And very few were actually in between, looking for information. The more I worked at it the more I got invited into major corporations, and then even governments. What I saw were very senior managers very scared, and spending hundreds of millions in a single corporations. The efforts were extraordinary. And congress passed legislation which made any compute investment a y2k maintenance issue, so for tax purposes there was a lot more spent.   As it got down to the wire I saw senior managers tell staffs to disconnect suspicious systems, and added "we will not have any problems. Do you hear me." That is, do what you must but don't report it. It was considered wimpy to have a Y2k problem. One company spent $200m on an approach and then told me *it failed* (by shifting over to SAP, which was then politically defeated by division VP's) , and then announced lower earnings because of Asian competition.   When y2k rolled over, many machines had been replaced, many were disconnected, or run in simplified modes.   And immediately the word went out - very few problems. Implication, it had all been hype. Several conclusions.   The run up in spending for IT stopped at January 1 (or shortly thereafter (as systems were brought back on line, replaced or software had to be reintegrated) and the DOW started down in January and the NASDAQ in March. I do believe the current recession is a result.   Second, after it was over, everyone wanted to forget about it. Those who thought it was going to be a blip had a few weeks of "I told you so" and those who thought it was big were embarrassed.   But key, much work was done because accountability was inside the organizations, where the effects were. People would have been seriously blamed for unsolved problems come Jan 1.   But other issues, such as climate change, are external to organizations and have no accountability. The result is, nothing much will be done.   ** There is a fascinating discussion of Big History going on over at  from H-net world history http://www.h-net.org/~world/   Patrick Manning, World History and African-American Studies, Northeastern University, writes.. (to give a snippet at what is being discussed.     David Christian, who coined the term "Big History," is also the first person to write a big book about big history. Others have written on history at this scale: Fred Spier wrote a very smart little book on big history and Graeme Snooks wrote four volumes surveying the dynamics of life on earth. But it is Christian who most coherently and yet in most detail has developed a historical "play of scales" presenting, within two covers, the vast yet mysterious simplicity of the birth of the cosmos, the complexity of modern society (so localized in time and space), and several well chosen stages in between.   For a review and discussion by world historians, however, we should get rapidly past marveling at the breadth of the author's undertaking and into the question of how this work fits into the perspective of world history.  Is world history a latter-day segment of big history? Is big history a field or approach within world history? Is it the case that big history (because it includes everything) is better defined than world history (because we can't agree where the latter begins)?   We may begin by claiming the difference to be that world history is centered on human history (whenever it started), while big history sets human history in the context of the natural world. But it's worth noting that more than half of Christian's work addresses human history. Clearly big history is intended to be set at the broadest available scale. But aside from differences in scale, does big history bring a perspective or style of analysis that is distinctive from that of world historians (or other world historians)? Let me go into some other details, and try to return later on to this issue of broad characterization of big history.   Maps of Time is organized into six sections containing one to four chapters each. The sections address the inanimate universe, life on earth, early human history, the Holocene era (meaning early agriculture and early civilizations), the modern era (the past thousand years), and the future.  (The section on the future naturally has only one chapter; the section on the modern era has four chapters; and the other sections have two or three chapters each.) Christian's periodization is this distinctive and provocative.   I wrote back   Maps of Time forces us to think through some assumptions.  Here's my take.   As a story it may be true - but irrelevant, or ideological. As presented it is a story about human life from the point of view of science, biology, large political organizations. This is just one possible "grand history". We could have a grand history of say the writing of poetry, an claim that The Map of Time, is one kind of poem, that humans are poetry makers (or story makers) and The Map of Time is a very plausible and successful story - but a story nevertheless that comes out of our story making capacity.   It is very different to say the Universe Story led to us than to say us humans created stories of which the universe story is one. In one case we are the product of the story, in the other the story is the product of us.   Behind this reasoning is my sense that a story that tends to be believed in is doing ideological work for the society. In particular, just as Marx had an inevitability thesis, so does market capitalism - that larger and larger organizations will emerge (Richard Wright's non-zero, where complexity always wins). With an inevitability that should make you hopeless about any alternative. The purpose o an ideology is to affect what is happening now, and the birth and death of the earth are events very far away in either direction, and may occlude the vision of the present as a livable artistic and, let's say, poetry centered world.   The point is, no widely believed story of human history is neutral as regards hidden ideological vectors.   Having written that I went to the history and philosophy site and found   From: johngay@fairley.ca Date: Mon, 03 May 2004 01:42:34 -0700 Subject: "Art" & "History"   "Art" and "history" are not simply abstractions. The relationship of text and narrative, of the sign (whether of language, ritual, and/or the esthetic), and of the shared story that tells of the emergence of the sign in a communally significant event, are somehow fundamental to human nature. The first collectively remembered sign and story, as with every representation since, must have figured a centre (a thing in context) for a shared attention. And however many and diverse our figures have become, the inevitable contest for even a minimal centrality, for acknowledgement of one's difference, does not allow for an entirely placeless subjectivity, pace the postmodernists. Even as we question the totalizing categories "art" and "history", we further our claims on/against a tradition of centralizing figures. The impression grows that since it is dangerous to claim, and sometimes to refuse, centrality, it is sure tempting to deny it. But sooner or later we’ll need some way to free these purported abstractions from their present assignments as fall guys in the metaphysics of deconstruction/ deconstruction of metaphysics, and open up some form of frankly anthropological-historical investigations into text and narrative, within which "history" and "art" will be western historical figures, at root human and relational whatever the abstract qualities of the metaphysics in which they have often appeared.   However, I share Hayden White's desire to see more "histories" than "history", since the relatively nonviolent course of history is generally one of decentralizing, or widely distributing access to, the scenes that our shared stories tell about. But, use of the singular collective noun remains in some respects appropriate. We need "history" to account for our collective participation in a single (now global) economic system, and in a shared ethical and historical process of foregoing earlier (usually more centralized and ritualized) forms of socioeconomic organization and religion. On the other hand, it is only in individual minds and histories that knowledge of the human is synthesized, e.g. by studying earlier art forms that emerged from the social and religious forms we have given up; similarly it is through individual, interacting minds and histories that new art forms emerge. Hence our love and resentment for creators whose implicit or explicit presence mediates our experience of works of "art" and "history" (in ways more memorable, or revelatory, than the experience of mere entertainment), and in relation to whom our own subjectivity is shaped. (Can talk of memes explain this essential, mimetic dynamic of art history?)   One might say that it is because we can't completely forego a shared "history" for our particular histories, that all stories and all art have, and will forever have, mythical or "constructed" qualities; but this speaks to their role in mediating the inescapable paradoxes of human interaction and is no reason to go to the extreme of denying their worldly referent in this same interaction - a denial White makes for at least the singular, history: "no one has ever perceived this thing "history"".  But I think I perceive it, right now: as a lived experience, history is only partly perceived in terms of one's personal experience of social or professional differences/interactions; but this individual history is mediated in terms of our relationship to culture's shared scenes or representations (from whose authority many feel alienated, out on a desiring periphery, while some learn a faith and become happily peripheral). This is to say that the concrete essence of "history" is the changing esthetics and ethics on which all forms of identity, narrative, and exchange depend. And further, it is the fictional, or hypothetical, quality of all narratives, including "history" that allows new truths about the human to be proposed and in time recognized by some ethical consensus or experience.   And I find myself much more at home in the openess of the art and theory folks than the standard historians.   And on climate, the complexities and secondary efects ar extreme. Look at   Reference Idso, C.D. and Idso, K.E.  2000.  Forecasting world food supplies: The impact of the rising atmospheric CO2 concentration.  Technology 7S: 33-56.   Background As the world's population continues to climb, there is increasing concern about the sustainability or carrying capacity of the planet; and in making decisions about long-term research and development policies, movers and shakers from many sectors of the global economy need to know if there will be sufficient food fifty years from now to sustain the projected population of the globe.  After all, it is only prudent that we attempt to gain such insight into the human condition (see our Editorial: Prudence Misapplied), for we all have a stake in the future progression of man and womankind.   What was done The authors developed and analyzed a supply-and-demand scenario for food in the year 2050.  Specifically, they identified the plants that currently supply 95% of the world's food needs and projected historical trends in the productivities of these crops 50 years into the future.  They also evaluated the growth-enhancing effects of atmospheric CO2 enrichment on these plants and made similar yield projections based on the increase in atmospheric CO2 concentration likely to have occurred by that future date.   What was learned The authors determined that world population will likely be 51% greater in the year 2050 than it was in 1998, but that world food production will be only 37% greater if its enhanced productivity comes solely as a consequence of anticipated improvements in agricultural technology and expertise.  However, they further determined that the consequent shortfall in farm production can be overcome - but just barely - by the additional benefits anticipated to accrue from the aerial fertilization effect of the expected rise in the air's CO2 content, assuming no Kyoto-style cutbacks in anthropogenic CO2 emissions.   What it means In order to avoid the unpalatable consequences of widespread hunger in the decades ahead - as though there were not enough of it already - it would appear to be necessary to allow the air's CO2 concentration to rise at an unrestricted rate.  Consequently, efforts designed to discourage CO2 emissions are seen in this light to be inimical to our future well-being, as well as that of generations yet unborn.   Posted by douglass carmichael 3:02:49 PM    comment []