That’s the question that comes to mind after reading an opinion published in SSPP today. This is the first set of economic crises I’m living through as an adult, so I have found these types of pieces (where the irreversible decline of America and the current generation is predicted) perplexing. I understand that my parents’ generation lived through several economic crises, and never did the end of America come. And because, I didn’t live through those, I can’t help but wonder what similarities between then and now exist.
If I were to the question in the article linked above, I’d have to say that whether or not we are getting poorer, we probably are not getting wiser. I feel this way because of the well documented reality that although information technology has made disparate points of view available to citizens at extraordinary rates, we only engage those voices that agree with us. In addition, these same technological advances much more heavily penalize departures from ideological purity if the majority of information consumed by citizens is propaganda. In other words, what we are seeing is a positive feedback loop, er, snowball, of disinformation accumulating in the public idea space.
The ingredients of these circumstances are not new: the proletariat distrusts the bourgeoisie; religious populism and educated elites share mutual antipathy for each’s truth claims; etc. What is new is the disappearance of the response time necessary to process the competing agendas. We are less wise because there is no longer any time to think!
See this weeks SSPP Blog post “London’s Burning, Will America Follow? ”
“The nature of the British riots points to a potential weakness in my last blog.”
http://ssppjournal.blogspot.com/2011/08/londons-burning-will-america-follow.html
Definitely. Thanks for the insightful work. I’ll let you know what I think.
Wow! I’m about halfway through when I reach this comment: “‘These are riots of defective and disqualified consumers.’ The hunger is not so much for goods as for meaning.” This is something I agree with, and I think Arturo Escobar alludes to this in his book “Encountering Development.” I think that from this perspective, not only are we less wise in diagnosing the causes and designing remedies for our current crises, but we are being confronted with the foolishness of having linked our communal purposes to consumption.
I really enjoyed this! It is astounding how people narrow the information and conversations they encounter primarily to the ones that compliment their own beliefs and points of view (according to a lot of articles, google and facebook really help this process along). This is why I’m an avid fan of debate–if their argument is good and reasonable and I have to reevaluate mine, then I’ve learned something.
Thanks Andrea for your encouraging comments. Of course, it’s always comfortable to hear one’s own point of view reinforced, but we become less wise because we can no longer and critique, evaluate, and ultimately strengthen ourselves where we are weak. Social media and information technologies don’t provide the feedback we need to encourage us to engage others.
On another note, I encourage you to read the SSPP post linked above: . It’s a great way to continue the discussion.
There are a number of reasons to think that this crisis is different, that the U.S. won’t come out of it in the same way. The middle class has been stagnant for decades, with growing debt, although the housing bubble covered it up to an extent (since people’s houses were keeping their net worth high). See, for instance, http://finance.yahoo.com/tech-ticker/the-u.s.-middle-class-is-being-wiped-out-here%27s-the-stats-to-prove-it-520657.html?tickers=^DJI,^GSPC,SPY,MCD,WMT,XRT,DIA and http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/17/business/17view.html?_r=2&th&emc=th. Financial crises, such as the one we just had, take far longer to dig out of than a normal recession—Japan, for instance, has never fully recovered from their financial crisis of the early 1990s. The United States has an unprecedented negative balance of trade that keeps growing worse. The federal debt is at record levels, while individual debt remains high, and our infrastructure is crumbling with insufficient attempts made to revitalize it. After World War II, the U.S. enjoyed an unmatched economic vitality; today China, India, and Brazil, among others, are growing rivals. There’s an assumption that everything is cyclical and that the past 50 years is the normal that we’ll always return to, but this is not true when you look at history from a larger perspective. The Roman Empire at one time seemed invincible, as did the British Empire.
Thank you, everyone, for the high tone and thoughtfulness of your comments!
Ethan