Tag: fixing the culture

The American Path

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I was thinking about some of the comments on yesterday’s post “Persistence of Memory.”  It was about detachment, “… it’s the consequence of the rootless existence that has evolved to be the American path.”

And I replied, “You are correct about the path. We’ve atomized our existence. We’ve monetized our lives to such an extent that we almost don’t exist except as consumers. We’re just cogs in the machine. It’s inhuman.”  And that stuck in my mind.

And today I got a call from a friend whom I knew from high school.  He lives in Hawaii and only comes home to Brooklyn once a year at Christmas.  And we talked about meeting up next Christmas.  Now I haven’t seen him in thirty years.  I wonder if he would even recognize me.  And we’ve managed to speak on the phone every Christmas but we haven’t interacted other than that.  Well, I sent him a copy of my book and he called me up today and it was like a time machine.  He was laughing and saying how he always thought one day I’d write a science fiction story.  He was very complimentary and said he really liked the story and of course that was very gratifying.  But in the back of my mind, I was thinking what a strange world we live in.  Here was one of my best friends in the world and I hadn’t seen him for almost half a lifetime.

And so that conversation reinforced the statement, “… it’s the consequence of the rootless existence that has evolved to be the American path.”  Our way of life is somewhat related to the nomadic existence of herders.  They move to follow the grazing grounds of their herds.  There is no one home.  But our way is even worse.  Because the herders live in tribes or at least extended families that move together from place to place.  But we separate into at most nuclear families and often just single individuals, moving from job to job and city to city without anyone permanently included in their “tribe.”

I’m pretty sure that none of this is sustainable.  And maybe that’s why corporate America is backing a policy of wholesale immigration to provide a steady supply of new workers that Americans are no longer providing from their own descendants.  After all, how do you produce a family when all you are is a nomad living from job to job without a family to prop you up and give you help when things get tough or you need the resources to get married or buy a house or pay for expenses associated with children?

And this gave me an idea for my next book after “The Sniper.”  It should have to do with the smartest and richest guy in the world trying to fix “the American path.”  If someone powerful enough wanted to restore our country to viability, what would he think to do?  Maybe he’d redefine the partnership between communities and corporations.  Would it be a feudal system or a socialism?  Or neither.  I haven’t figured out what my “utopia” will be based on.  Maybe I’ll wave “artificial intelligence” around as my deus ex machina.  But I do want to think about it a little.  How do you go about fixing the world?

Stopping the Left is Not Enough

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If you look at all the crazy things going on in our country you would be excused for thinking that all that is necessary to fix our problems is removing all of the leftists from power.  You might think that if we had fifty Governor DeSantises and people like him running our cities and in Congress that everything would go back to normal.  I think I used to believe that either consciously or unconsciously.  All we needed was good leaders and everything would revert to a normal world.  I no longer believe that to be the case.

Our world has drifted very far from a healthy pattern.  We could probably spend eternity debating what were the causes of this drift.  Some people would point all the way back to the Enlightenment and the dethroning of religion as the center of human life in the West.  Maybe that’s true.  Other people point to the emancipation of women as the spark that destroyed the family and led us to the place we are now.  I think cases could be made for a number of causes for what has happened to our world.

The point I want to make is that some kind of change is going to have to happen.  And either we are going to make these changes ourselves or nature will fix them for us.  An example of what happens when you let your society degenerate would be the end of the classical world.  The Western Roman Empire was toppled by German tribesmen who realized just how feeble the Roman state had become.  And a few hundred years later the Eastern Roman Empire was almost completely swept away by the armies of Arabia galvanized by a fundamentalist religion that gave meaning and order to their lives.

Something very similar will happen to our world unless we step back and restore sanity to the way we live.  Our institutions have to stop propagandizing our youth as to the value and desirability of living a secularized and sterile existence that eschews marriage and children.  The idea that it is acceptable and even preferred to adopt an identity that puts you at odds with biological reality is madness.  And all the other LGBTQ lifestyles must also be identified as deviancy that doesn’t merit celebration but at most pity and possibly tolerance if it isn’t allowed to corrupt the youth.

And these are just the negative aspects of our society that must be addressed.  At the same time, changes must be enacted to amplify society’s effect on the positive behaviors we want to encourage.  Our government must support the formation and flourishing of families.  If a man and a woman are raising up children the government should be doing everything it can to maximize the odds that they will create good, well-adjusted and productive people.  The tax laws and the social safety net should be primarily focused on these people.  Everything should be done to allow young women to stay home with their children during those formative years.  And this shouldn’t be done just because it is helpful to the child-rearing task but also because raising a family is the most fulfilling occupation that two people can hope to have.  And a young mother at home with her young children is the necessary center of such a family.  Without her it is an incomplete and confused fragment of what a family should be.  A poor family with a mother at home has its struggles.  But even a rich family without a mother at home is unbalanced and often unhappy.  The children feel the lack but don’t know what they’re missing.

And there are so many things about our society that are unhealthy and dangerous.  The complete disappearance of religion from our daily life and the normalizing of unhealthy obsessions like drugs and pornography have destroyed countless young lives.  All of these things are justified by our fetish with freedom.  A re-evaluation on the limits of freedom is painfully overdue.

And if society doesn’t start making these changes very soon, then as I said at the beginning of this rant, nature will do it for us.  Or more accurately, do it for our successors that live in healthier cultures.