Once I wrote a poem that started something like this:
The problem I have is this
Food in a box
As an urban dweller - skill seller
I'm marketable. Size 10 in my sox.
I can find anyone, anywhere to sell and be sold to.
Now I'm pissed because I can't find all of my poems anywhere in the Vault. I will, [I have], but the point of that poem was that modernity reduces. For a long time, I had been an organic. An organic is a person who refuses to be leveraged by social convention, rather he seeks to define his own meaning and his own significance in society. It is sometimes a defiant stance, and for me, there was a bit of contempt for the middle class. I still sense the tension between the convenience of modernity and the independence of organic life.
Today however I am rather irked by some particular consequences of modernity. But I need to explain modernity a bit more. Modernity was the thing that broke the back of feudalism. Sorta. Modernity carved out the space for that which is our new middle class, the semi-independent herd of workers enabled by industrialization, ecumenical-ism and civil rights.
You don't need letters of recommendation. You are an interchangeable person. You can be educated, employed, and come to own property regardless of your tribe. In fact, your tribe is diminished to zero, and your standing in society is a function of your willingness and ability to conform to the shape of the modern man. In my evolving worldview you are still a peasant, but you are middle class and that means something important in the modern world.
But there's a significant problem with modernity. I don't have the shortcut to explain it by way of a reference in literature, but it is the anonymity and the lack of meaning that you are forced to accept as part of accepting your place in the meritocracy. It is at odds with our human desire to be recognized as special. It results in the sort of anomie which is the subject of many of our great works of literature - I always hear that the best is Thomas Mann's Magic Mountain, a book I have not read at all.
Clay Shirky:
Complex societies collapse because, when some stress comes, those societies have become too inflexible to respond. In retrospect, this can seem mystifying. Why didn’t these societies just re-tool in less complex ways? The answer Tainter gives is the simplest one: When societies fail to respond to reduced circumstances through orderly downsizing, it isn’t because they don’t want to, it’s because they can’t.
This is an essay that I have held since April trying to find the right way to conclude it. It is, by my reckoning, one of the most important themes I like to discuss at Cobb, which is the role of the common man in a global economy and putatively post-national society. One of the milestones ahead in this great transformation of identity and society will be the ubiquity of universal language translation devices and the implications for the world of film, narrative, literature, etc. Here in the US, where multiculturalism has good intentions but foul results, there may or may not emerge the sort of pluralism that will survive this milestone. And if the US stumbles significantly through war or economic dislocation, there is something that will be lost to the world for some time and the sorts of power struggles it will launch will be catastrophic for democracy.
Ever since Bill Whittle raised the question of the Grey, it has been clear to me personally the kinds of people I would associate with to ensure the survival of my family and friends. And I have had my mind on societal tumult and even collapse with the distinct notion that our contemporary rules of civility will not withstand it. But I am convinced that there is a significant and substantial set of Americans who will withstand such collapse and I seek to maintain proximity to them. The question always on my mind, therefore is whether or not our ruling elites are anchored with those Americans or not. And my answer tends to be 'generally not'.
The consequence of this floating flotilla of leadership flotsam is that there is a feedback loop of public support amongst them and a certain fraction of the public I call peasants, and that these poor peasants don't recognize how insecure they really are. They walk around thinking 'this is America' or 'this is not America' both with a sort of passive cynicism that will leave them in the lurch. They tend to be my political enemies, and I tend to mock them, but I do not know how to save them or alert them. I expect that they will even misread the failures and catastrophes that await them. And so I sadly mock them as they fail - like the pregnant woman who voted for Obama because she thought she'd get pre-natal care.
The American cities and our urbanity is in jeopardy because it has not generated anything approaching a sustained gentility and wisdom in its ruling class. And when nobility can only be found in rebellion, society is heading towards revolution.
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