In a comment on my recent post The Left Blogosphere. Or: Bebop Redux. As Above, So Below, BostonJoe wrote:
I wrote a reply that got pretty long.
I am posting it now as a stand-alone diary.
Read on if you are interested.
I am optimistic.
On the evidence.
On the evidence of the continued evolution of mankind over its entire history.
And by extension…on the evidence of the continued evolution of life itself on this planet.
A planet which is just a little backwater of the whole universe.
But if the Sufi concept of “As above, so below” holds true even on the highest of levels…a concept that has been sufficiently proven to me by the evidence of my own senses and observations on this plane upon which we all share our own existences… if it applies far above and far below us, then it is a universal law.
Literally the law of the universe.
Life evolves.
That which evolves is alive.
Universally. (As far as we can see, at the very least.)
Thus the universe is alive.
This living universe is evolving.
LIFE is alive.
The life of Life.
Praise be its unknowable names.
Now back to the mundane.
The here and now.
Blogs.
The internet and human society in general.
The United States in particular.
You write:
I KNOW that evolution continues.
I know that “evolution” is not a straight line.
On the evidence.
There are failures.
There are regressions.
There are periods of little or no change.
There are periods of steady small change.
And there are quantum leaps.
In the United States, I see only ONE real, presently functioning agent of change at present.
The internet.
Not the government, not the political parties, not the churches, not the educational, scientific or so-called “intellectual” elites…they have ALL been co-opted, bought and sold by short term profit-driven entities called corporations. And evolution is NOT about short-term profit. It is about long-term progression brought about through the taking of huge risks.
A large system cannot do this. It cannot AFFORD to this. Large systems are about the conservation of their own power. About stasis.
So…where IS this evolution occurring?
Look around.
It used to be in America that social evolution occurred mainly through the efforts of minorities.
New blood.
Remember the convection current experiment through which we all had to suffer in school? The one in which the heated water at the bottom of the flask rose and displaced the cooler water at the top, whereupon the same process repeated itself until the heat was turned off?
Again…as above, so below.
The poor at the bottom of the social convection system kept things moving.
The history of jazz in America is one of the clearest examples of that process. (See the other post that is linked at the beginning of this one for more on that.)
Well, with the exception of the Spanish-speaking population of the U.S. that cannot be easily co-opted by the system as it stands because of language barriers that are not being effectively surmounted…and HOORAY for multiculturalism as far as I am concerned…that system is no longer functioning. The English speaking poor…which basically means the black population here…still burn, but their fire is either almost immediately co-opted by the Corps (Witness rap) or it is turned back upon them in the form of institutionalized poverty, drugs, crime and the so-called justice system.
So the question remains…where is this evolution happening?
The OTHER truly evolutionary forces that have occurred here within living memory were:
1-The Depression…where “the poor” were nearly EVERYBODY to one degree or another.
2-W.W. II…a fight for survival is always “evolutionary” if it is successful.
and
3-The youth movement of the ’60s and ’70s. Where the tactic of co-option was first perfected by the Corps.
Where now?
As a sort of mass movement?
Here.
On the internet.
An Information Revolution as befits an Information Age.
If you wanted to know about the CIA’s nefarious activities in 1973 or 1989 you had to haul yourself down to the best library you could find and spend DAYS tracking down scattered bits of information.
Today?
Google say <CIA +”Operation Mockingbird”>.
20,800 hits.
Have fun.
And go get educated.
Remember Timothy Leary’s “Turn on, tune in, and drop out” meme?
Didn’t work…nice try, though. Got somewhere…just not quite far enough. Drugs will do that.
Today?
Sign on, tune in and drop UP.
Yes, I am optimistic.
Instead of being an (at least recently fashionable) minimalist, I am an optimalist.
I am optimalistic.
Because I believe in evolution.
On the evidence.
When will I STOP being an optimist?
An optimalist?
When I hear the Big Boom.
(A piddling echo of the Big Bang.)
And not until.
And even then…my last thought will be something on the order of…”One small misstep for mankind. The Universe continues unabated.”
“The-th-th-th-th-th-That’s all, folks!!!”
Yup.
And “So it goes” if I have the time for a second thought.
So it goes.
Thus, in the full confidence that there will indeed BE a “later” (Talk about optimism!!!) I bid you farewell now.
And
Later…
AG
It’s all gonna be OK.
AG
P.S. Tips? Recs? YOU know…
AG, you make me feel like when the sun comes out after a storm.
I’m right on board with you man (even if I am one of those scientist types – must be the good influence of the jazz in my life), although it’s been hard to remember that the sun is ever gonna shine again during the last six years. The morning after the election I felt like a load of bricks was lifted off my back. And I asked myself “Why are you so happy? That clown is still in office for another two years.” And I realized it was the return of hope that made me feel so much lighter.
When some group of people manage to collect a great deal of power and wealth they always try mightily to maintain the status quo that brought them to power. But they can never control everything – there is always some little detail that escapes their grasp, something new that develops, that ends up being their downfall. The crack in the foundation or leak in a roof that eventually brings down a house. The small sewer drain by which enemy troops gain access to the fortified city. The bacteria that bring down an army. A certain Mideastern radical cult and the Roman Empire. The grass in a crack in the superhighway. A Gandhi, a King, a Walesa, a Mandela.
Those heavily invested in the status quo, who think they have all the angles covered, can never win in the long run, because change is the name of the game.
The universe doesn’t exist, it becomes. (This is the secret of why we both keep riffing off the I Ching and the Tao Te Ching: the Chinese didn’t develop the verb “to be” until long after they had the verb “to become.”)
And with the problems we face – environmental degradation, addiction to a rapidly depleting energy source that we do not control, etc. – change is the only way we’re gonna survive. Or put another way, only those that can change are gonna survive. Those that can read the signs and change first are those that are gonna thrive, and become the big wheels for the next round of the game.
Invest in solar bio-based and wind power now. Can’t afford that? Plant a garden, or participate in a community garden. Yada-yada, y’all know that song.
So, AG, care to speculate in a little more detail how it’s all gonna play out in the grand scheme of things? How we get from the R and D wholly-owned subsidiaries of the PermaGov back into the sunlight? Inquiring minds wanna know. And maybe riff off each other’s insights along the way.
See you soon.
Knox…
Feel like the sun’s come put?
Glad to help make that point.
You write:
How it’s all gonna play out?
Short of a meltdown of some sort?
Compromises.
Left/intelligence (The real kind, not the government kind)/necessity-driven centrist compromise.
Too many people to have anything ELSE happen.
Necessity driven by the potential environmental and nuclear war aspects of the situation.
Left/intelligence driven because that’s where the brains are.
Centrist compromise because there are still (and will remain) LOTS of dummies.
Vector forces all pushing the Good Ship Lollipop in whatever directions it sails.
Always at the last minute. Just before it hits the rocks. Because that’s when the dummies generally wake up and say things like “Hitler? Oh HITLER!!! I didn’t notice until just now”, and then agree to some of the course changes that were recommended by the smart ones years earlier.
“Global warming? Oh, Global WARMING!!! I thought it was just hot in here. Or was it you? Y’know, those windmills don’t look half bad on the back 40!!! And I LIKE these little cars.”
Duh.
But it happens.
That’s about as detailed as I can get in good conscience.
I think that Hillary Clinton stands a VERY good chance of being our next President.
I think that she is a closet radical, at least on social issues. I also think that she is a political genius and a master of compromise. (Mistress of compromise? OK, let’s not go there. Not with THAT last name.)
I do not think that a Republican can POSSIBLY win the next Presidential election by any other means than by lat-out canceling it. And I do NOT think that the military would; allow that. Not because they are truly opposed to dictatorship on any philosophical level…just because they know what incompetent asses THESE dictators would be.
I think that a Pan-Islamic movement will continue to grow and that it will encounter troubles within itself because of the contradictions inherent in ALL devolving religions.
I think that a Pan South/Central]Caribbean American movement will continue to grow as well, but it will take them several generations to clean up the various messes left behind by military and economic colonialisms.
I think that China is too big and too diverse to function really well as a single entity once the uniting aspects of poverty begin to wear off. One more generation at MOST.
I think that poor Africa is fucked for another hundred years. Maybe more. It would take three or generations to recover even if the recovery started in earnest today. And it is NOT starting. Not by a long shot.
I think that Russia will fall apart in kleptocratic, gangster-driven greed.
Watch.
Surrounded by Islam on the south, China on the east, Europe on the west and the U.S. damned near EVERYWHERE. Putin is just a tough KGB guy with strong mob connections. Nothing to found a long-term success upon.
That leaves Europe + the U.S.
Europe is in the best shape.
By far.
Minimal poverty, huge financial and industrial capabilities, almost universally good education, diverse and still able to loosely cooperate. (The European Union is fuzzy logic made flesh.)
The U.S.
Two generations to rescue its work force from the depredations of the Corps if it were to start in 2008. Able to survive because of its vast wealth in the meantime.
Didja read the U.N report on who owns what?
And who doesn’t?
As reported by Bloomberg…and who should know better?
Poorest are in Africa, India, part of Asia, study finds.
By BILL VARNER
BLOOMBERG NEWS
One percent of the world’s adults owns 40 percent of all global assets, according to a United Nations report that describes a growing gap between rich and poor.
That chunk of the world’s wealth is held by the 37 million people with a net worth of $500,000 or more, according to the Helsinki-based World Institute for Development Economics of the U.N. University.
—snip—
The richest 10 percent of adults, with assets of $61,000 or more, own 85 percent of global wealth, the report said. At the same time, the United Nations said the poorest half of the world’s adult population owns barely 1 percent of the wealth.
—snip—
Almost all of the world’s richest people live in North America, Europe and Asia-Pacific nations, the report said.
Yup.
Conditions like that do not change rapidly OR radically, short of a major disaster.
Which could always come down, of course.
Short of a disaster…that’s what I see, anyway.
The Movement of the status quo is like the movement of tectonic plates.
Slow, steady, but almost impossible to predict accurately as far as when, where and how the changes wil manifest on the surface.
But one prediction is ALWAYS accurate.
Show they will.
Bet on it.
Show they will.
Later…
AG
Apparently, in making his snarky remark, BostonJoe overlooked his own efforts, assisted largely by internet exposure. But yes, the great value of blogging and the internet is the dispersal of information/knowledge. A close second is the newfound ability to organize.
I don’t think so, anyway.
But what do I know?
I’m just a starry-eyed optometrist.
Or something.
AG
You are an opulent inspiration.
I threw my comment into your old diary. And that’s all the </notblogging> I can do today. But I was not being snarky. You guessed right. Very inspirational for someone with such a broad picture of it all to pull it all together for a living-forceful-purposeful kind of direction.
Like I said. I’m with you in optometristalims. Sometimes. And just as easily dark. Fickle. Maybe.
thanks very much AG!
Left Blogistan is a place where it’s easy to be overwhelmed by the very real problems of the world. Internet time is so much faster than real time that we, talking about it every day, expect the political universe to turn on a dime. You’re thinking long-term, (and an optimist in that you think there will be a long term).