Tuesday, September 21, 2004

Posted here Tuesday, September 21, 2004 at 10:35:10 AM     Another way of looking at the previous: the progressives and conservatives both believe in economic production, but split between openness and control on social issues. But this split is not the key that people feel in their gut. The problem is, much of the country (and all of to some degree) are not happy with the model of continually expanding production. But to stop economic growth would be to create crisis in the whole system because there is not a flow of income to support much of the population. We are on the edge of negotiating our way through this edge where more will lead to collapse, but stopping will lead to chaos. What to do? A major question seems to me to be how politics and technology intersect. And can new tech, nano for example, offer a way toward more economics with less stuff? What can of governance can make these decisions? Is one dollar one vote the model? Or does it just lead to the tech that aids centralized control? ********

Posted here Tuesday, September 21, 2004 at 9:54:25 AM       I continually am puzzled by the depth of confusion about "liberal". To many it means the expectation that markets and production will create a better world and that the tensions between ownership and employment can be managed. In its modern form it leads to neo-liberalism, which is the belief in markets and individual property uber alles. (and then we have the neo-cons, who really are neo-liberals in many ways). Yet another tradition of "liberal" means generosity, tolerance, and the belief that if people are given education and hope the can do well without coercion. The problem is that the American liberal is seen as being in favor of big world forces  by the American small world folks. (who paradoxically it seems, seems, would use military to impose restraints on change).   A challenge to the liberals is   Christopher Lasch's (from the preface to The Only True Heaven, a critique of the critiques of the concept of progress, 1991)   The political economists of progress hoped to unleash wealth creating desire; Emerson and Carlyle reaffirmed the ancient folk wisdom to which overweening desire invites retribution, the corrective, compensatory force of nemesis. …It is most simply described, perhaps, as the sensibility of the petty  bourgeoisie…I have no intention of minimizing the narrowness and provincialism of nor do I deny that it has produced racism, nativism, anti-intellectualism, and all the other evils so often cited by liberal critics. But liberals have lost sight of what is valuable in lower middle class culture in their eagerness to condemn what is objectionable. Their attack on "Middle America," which eventually gave rise to a a counter attack against liberalism—the main ingredient in the rise of the new right - have blinded them to the positive features of petty-bourgeois culture: its moral realism, its understanding that everything has its price, its skepticism about progress. Whatever can be said against them, small proprietors, artisans, tradesmen, and farmers—more often victims of "'improvement" than beneficiaries—are unlikely to mistake the promised land of progress for the true and only heaven.   In the back of my mind is comparing why George Lakoff is so popular in his analysis of political language of the republicans and democrats when Lasch's seems the more powerful - and usable.  I think the answer is that Lasch forces us all to reconsider who progress and our own social position is being resisted by the red states, the country conservatives, the religious resistors. Lasch assumes that our own position is OK. ********