Hi all, I was away all last week, so no newsletter. I hope your brains managed to cope without me. I’m back with links to three other newsletters that have caught my eye this week. Feel free to comment below, as always, or to drop me a message.
Paul Kingsnorth, in his newsletter The Abbey of Misrule is trying to dissect modernity in an attempt to understand how it all went wrong. Personally, I’m not sure everything has gone wrong (though I’m sure a lot has), but I’m a big fan of these kinds of sweeping historical articles. In “A Thousand Mozarts” Kingsnorth begins with a speech by Jeff Bezos about space exploration and then goes back to the French Revolution to show why we should be suspicious of the whole endeavour.
It’s a great - albeit quite long - article. To summarise, Kingsnorth argues that the Age of Reason, which started back in the 18th century, with the French Revolution and Enlightenment more generally, is fundamentally flawed. The world is too complex to be neatly ordered, controlled, and colonised, despite our best efforts. As Kingsworth notes: “because the story is at least partially true - we have modern medicine and the Internet and sort-of democracies and space flight as demonstrations that empiricism and rational enquiry can deliver at least some goods - we are able to keep telling it.”
What’s the alternative to Reason and Progress? Intuition and Tradition? Isn’t that going backwards? By the end of the article, Kingsworth suggests this is a false dichotomy: “What we are seeing now, I think, is that the standard choices presented to us - reason versus superstition; progress versus barbarism; past versus future; Earth versus space; growth versus stasis - were always chimeras. The choice is not between ‘going forward’ or ‘going back’, but between working with the complexity of human and natural realities, in all their organic messiness, or attempting to supersede them with abstractions which can never hope to contain them.” Nice.
In support of the idea that modern society is going a bit crazy, here’s a nice article on QAnon and conspiracy theories by Will Wilkinson, from his newsletter Model Citizen. Wilkinson begins his article being outraged and generally flabbergasted by the shit people are currently swallowing - from the COVID-19 vaccine causing infertility to Hillary Clinton torturing children in satanic rituals. By the end of the article, however, he suggests that the craziness of these beliefs somewhat misses the point.
Wilkinson argues that, when it comes to our beliefs, we have no choice other than to rely on trust and testimony. I, for example, believe in climate change. Have I read all the reports published by the IPCC? Hell no! I’ve not even read one of them. In fact, I’ve read very little climate science at all. But I trust the 99% of climate scientists who have written all those reports and say that it’s a serious problem.
The question is who do we trust? Or, more accurately, in which authorities do we trust? As Wilkinson points out: “Almost all the general information in your personal web of belief is stuff you read, stuff somebody told you, stuff you saw on TV. Building a relatively accurate mental model of the world doesn’t have all that much to do with your individual reasoning capacity. It’s mostly about trusting and distrusting the right people.”
Even more problematic is that we can’t individually work out who to trust either. We need to be told who to trust by trustworthy authorities! It’s trust all the way down. As Wilkinson argues, if you start out trusting to wrong people, you can easily get trapped in a bubble: “They’ll tell you to trust other unreliable people, who in turn will tell you to trust unreliable methods. And they’ll tell you to distrust the genuinely trustworthy people.” That’s a hard, sticky web to climb yourself out of. In fact, I’d say it’s near to impossible to do alone. It’s the entire information ecology that’s largely at fault, not the individuals who believe the bullshit it spits out.
The last newsletter article comes from The Upheaval by N.S. Lyons, who’s also trying to zoom in and out to understand these bigger, crazy cultural patterns we’re currently witnessing. For Lyons, the revolutionary tide is being led by the “Woke” New Faith-Ideology. The counter-revolution is “the informal and disorganized… network of people… with a mission of actively pushing back against the revolutionary tide.”
The four big questions Lyons asks are: 1) Is Liberalism what needs to be saved, or the source of the problem? 2) Is rationalism savior or suspect? 3) Is the machine of technological-capitalism sustainable, and is it a blessing or a curse? 4) Is a new balance possible? I don’t think I can reasonably sum up what Lyons has to say on all of them here, so I suggest checking out the article if they pique your interest.
What I find interesting about Lyons questions is just how different people’s views can be on the state of the world. You can be either entirely against modernity - seeing humanity as a cancer, destined to destroy the planet - or hail it as a huge success story - delivering billions out of poverty and all the other good stuff. One way of reconciling these views is to acknowledge that both are true. There’s no contradiction in saying that modern society is both brilliant and terrifying in equal measure.
That’s why we should still be doing our best to make things better while recognising that many things are actually working. It’s a much more confusing place to be and takes much longer to get your head around. But it’s probably how things are.
Some pretty big and heavy topics this week! I do recommend reading all of the linked articles in full if you’ve got the time. Otherwise, don’t worry yourself too much, and I’ll see you again in 7 day’s time. Good luck out there!