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comment by kleinbl00
kleinbl00  ·  2587 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: How do you solve a problem like the Gracchis?

I've read 3/4ths of Durant's magnum opus. Know what's great about it? It's completely dispassionate about every passionate period in the history of the world. About the only time Durant gets a little tiny bit excited is when he's discussing Gandhi, and he wrote Our Oriental Heritage twelve years before the India Independence Act. He's a historian commenting (accurately) on history as it happens and he can't help but be cautiously optimistic. The rest of the time? The Crusades from three sides. The War of the Roses from all perspectives. Frickin' 750 pages on Julius Caesar and the fall of the Roman empire.

    Rome remained great as long as she had enemies who forced her to unity, vision, and heroism. When she had overcome them all she flourished for a moment and then began to die.

(Of course, Toynbee was more concise: "civilizations die from suicide, not by murder")

You say there are two topics - history and politics. But really, you come to the conclusion that it's the history of politics and the politics of history. The two are largely inseparable; much as Durant tries to be dispassionate and unbiased AF, the fact that his "world history" starts off with basically a prologue that's nothing more than "and here's everything that isn't Europe" is exactly the orientalism that Said built a career tearing down. Africa? South America? Nowhere in Durant. The "story of civilization" ignores two entire continents.

It's interesting. You, on the Gracchis:

    How do you get people to go along with changes that hurt them in the now, even hurt them for the next decade, but are ultimately necessary? How do you do this when the people you need to convince are not the ones suffering, and are so removed from the suffering that they aren't able to comprehend it? How do you, peacefully, prevent your society from collapsing when its aristocracy ceases to operate in the best interest of the state?

This quote is relevant to your interests:

    We aim to make the case and rally support for American global leadership.

    As the 20th century draws to a close, the United States stands as the world's preeminent power. Having

    led the West to victory in the Cold War, America faces an opportunity and a challenge: Does the United

    States have the vision to build upon the achievements of past decades? Does the United States have the

    resolve to shape a new century favorable to American principles and interests?

- Project for the New American Century, Statement of Principles,, 1997

The solution of the Gracchi brothers was to advance the inevitable military dictatorship Rome became by seizing land from the wealthy and giving it to the centurions. The solution of the PNAC was "invade Iraq."

Read much of the Rationalists? I'm a fan of Robert Kaplan; much as Toynbee argues that civilizations ebb and flow, Kaplan argues that civilizations follow a cycle of barbarians from the hills sweeping onto the plains, conquering the farmers, getting soft, settling into farming and getting conquered by barbarians sweeping in from the hills. There's Durant, Toynbee and Kaplan, all in a row - civilizations are at their peak when they're busy killing their neighbors.

The Mayans are still there. They're Quechua. You'd have a hard time arguing they're worse off now as a bunch of llama-herding potato farmers than they were as temple builders. It's something Durant points out multiple times per book (and there are 11 books): when we study the horrors of history, we miss the fact that most people alive in that period were just getting along, doing their thing, growing food, having kids and drinking beer. All the disruptions you list (except nuclear war - there will never be nuclear war and if you want I'll go nine rounds defending that) will shift the power structure but power structures shift. One man's Pax Romana is another man's Evil Empire.

    Religious fundamentalists conspire with militant insurgents to launch a terrorist attack on the greatest symbol of hegemonic power. The destruction of the Death Star results in the loss of thousands of innocent lives on board, and subsequently triggers an intergalactic conflict resulting in the loss of hundreds of thousands more. Movie ends with the surviving insurgents feted as heroes before cheering crowds for this unprecedented outrage.

- Star Wars: A New Hope

The question then is not "How do you solve a problem like the Gracchis" but should you.



JTHipster  ·  2587 days ago  ·  link  ·  
This comment has been deleted.
kleinbl00  ·  2587 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Inherent in your answers are the maxim "my perspective is correct, all other perspectives are wrong."

- Slavery. You: A "small question", something "we should really get around to answering". Yet the whole reason we're in this bullshit Dredd Scott-driven 3/5ths of a person electoral college catastrophe is that the South were never going to get rid of slavery and if we wanted an outcome other than the British picking the colonies off one by one, the North had to go along to get along. You act as if 600,000 people died because of some act of nature or something when the fact of the matter is, a million and a half people were willing to die to protect the institution of slavery.

- The Depression. FDR "knew how to handle the regular people" but not half so well as Huey Long, who was challenging him in 1936 and likely would have unseated his ass if he hadn't been shot in 1935. And the Kingfish was not a nice guy. He woulda been Mussolini with a drawl. Hell, ask the Chicago School about FDR; they'll tell you he extended the depression a decade. Ask the Wall Street posse at the time who tried to overthrow him. There are people then and now who think FDR was a terrible president.

- The Gracchis. "How do you fix Rome, and how do you get people to go along with it?" This assumes that Rome was broken - Yet after the Gracchis were assassinated there were five frickin Dynasties of noteworthy Roman emperors before things got really dumb and moved to Byzantium. You're basically arguing that the death of John Brown was the seed that destroyed the United States except to really make the point it would have to be the year 2300AD. And I recognize that it's fashionable to go "yup, Rome was fucked 100 years before Caesar" but the reason everyone's fuzzy on how the Romans went out is it took a long goddamn time, was incremental AF and by the time people realized that Rome was really assed out Henry VIII was busy deciding he could marry whoever he wanted.

And it's narrow perspectives like that that lead to thinking like this:

    The questions we face now, from climate change to how you handle post-industrial economies, to labor automation to the extent of free trade, to the nature of the United States as a global power, those aren't questions with easy answers. Everyone thinks we need to deal with this (except climate change for....some reason), but people aren't sure how.

Every problem you can name, there's a string of experts on both sides that are smarter than you, more researched than you, and 100% convinced they have the solution to the problem and the other side does not. Here, this bit's hilarious:

    At some point in the future we are going to get self-driving cars. We're going to get automated labor. It won't be awesome science fiction, it will be really boring, and it will be drawn out over enough time so that people don't really notice until we're all the way in to it. People are going to lose jobs, and we're going to find that all of the people who went "no jobs will always exist" were saying that based off of historical trends that applied to industrial societies and industrial innovations.

"Automated labor" is the steam engine and the cotton gin and self-driving cars are anything that doesn't come with horses and a coachman. Know what a "job" is? It's something someone else will pay you to do because they don't want to do it or don't know how. Some jobs are awesome and gone - I would fuckin' have loved to be a blacksmith. That would be a dope-ass job. Some jobs are bullshit and gone - I would not have wanted to be the cabinboy who crawls into the skull of the sperm whale to scoop gunk out with a bucket so that Charles Dickens could write at night. But people forget basic fucking Econ 101: If you want to sell something, someone has to buy it and automation and computers and migration and refugees and technology and agriculture and GMOs and all the rest shift the supply/demand curve, they don't destroy it.

Edison fought like hell to keep Westinghouse and Tesla from converting the world to AC power. Had Edison won, we would have big dumb powerplants every few blocks. Our power infrastructure would largely be trucks full of oil and coal driving around and holy shit, it would have been a jobs dynamo. But instead, we have high tension lines, AC transmission and a centralized power structure that (A) keeps North America from looking like Blade Runner (B) put a lot of people out of work several dozens of years before any of us were born.

Yet things turned out largely okay.

Had the North put their feet down and said "no slavery never nope" the South would likely have reverted to colonies, the British would have crushed the American rebellion, France might well have remained a monarchy and for all we know, we'd be fighting WWVII for the Queen against Kaiser Wilhelm IX in the northern Raj.

    That may be what all democracies eventually become, dictatorships by choice when a hyper-competent, charismatic leader comes along.

There simply aren't that many to choose from. Civics assholes love pointing at Rome before Caesar or the Greeks or WTFEver but they had slaves, you had to own land, and the same assholes that will paint the Greeks as "democrats" will point to the "first among equals" structure of the Bedouin and call them barbarian heathens. Democracy is where everybody gets a say and whipping out "I know better than everyone else" speech stinks pretty heavily of the Project for a New American Century.

    The problem we need to solve isn't the preservation of Democracy, it's the problem how whether or not a coming power shift, if it has to happen, is going to cost the lives of hundreds of thousands, or a handful.

You don't know. I don't know. If you think you have a clue, your duty is to convince everybody else... and listen with a clear head to everyone who disagrees with you.

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