Wheelruts
On the home page of the Online Etymology Dictionary, which many of you will know I explore with alarming frequency, is found this statement: "This is a map of the wheel-ruts of modern English. Etymologies are not definitions; they're explanations of what our words meant and how they sounded 600 or 2,000 years ago."
One of the problems I've found with young people (by which I mean people aged 25 or so and below) arises from the fact that they were born in the mid-1980s or later, were tiny tots as 9 Nov 1989 passed by with a whimper and a bang, and conveniently missed most or all of the excitement of the Cold War, which they read as historical stuff akin to the rise of Mesopotamian city-states. The problem is that they are thoroughly post-modern.
They think of states as primitive geographical features that somehow arose with the Treaty of Westphalia; they think of societies as pre-Marxist, Marxist and post-Marxist; they have no idea what democracy really is, or why republicanism ought (but isn't) to be a more civilised (Latin) or politic (Greek) form of it. This leads to ludicrous arguments in which they argue that globalisation will destroy the very idea of statehood simply because the physical barriers are easily overcome by technology.
That's a bit like joining Aldous Huxley in predicting that the very idea of parenthood will be destroyed simply because the physical acts of becoming a parent and then parenting are easily overcome by technology. It can be imagined, but it isn't likely unless humans overcome their natures and become post-humans.
Will that happen? Perhaps, it might. But my sincere belief is that if we ever become post-humans of the kind our ancestors might have worshipped, armed with sub-attotechnology and wielding the raw forces of coloured gravitonics and suchlike, we will only be like the gods of ancient Assyria and Achaia and other such old powers.
We will just be humans writ large and strange (or small and stranger), but still humans, attempting to bootstrap our way out of humanity and still being tightly shoelaced via leather to our soles. Or souls, whichever.
In tracing our paths to the stars and the uttermost bounds (or boundlessnessess) of the universe, all we will be doing is extending the wheelruts of a cart drawn by aa tired ox through a dusty, sparsely grassy, valley in the high summer of Mesopotamian hills long gone.
One of the problems I've found with young people (by which I mean people aged 25 or so and below) arises from the fact that they were born in the mid-1980s or later, were tiny tots as 9 Nov 1989 passed by with a whimper and a bang, and conveniently missed most or all of the excitement of the Cold War, which they read as historical stuff akin to the rise of Mesopotamian city-states. The problem is that they are thoroughly post-modern.
They think of states as primitive geographical features that somehow arose with the Treaty of Westphalia; they think of societies as pre-Marxist, Marxist and post-Marxist; they have no idea what democracy really is, or why republicanism ought (but isn't) to be a more civilised (Latin) or politic (Greek) form of it. This leads to ludicrous arguments in which they argue that globalisation will destroy the very idea of statehood simply because the physical barriers are easily overcome by technology.
That's a bit like joining Aldous Huxley in predicting that the very idea of parenthood will be destroyed simply because the physical acts of becoming a parent and then parenting are easily overcome by technology. It can be imagined, but it isn't likely unless humans overcome their natures and become post-humans.
Will that happen? Perhaps, it might. But my sincere belief is that if we ever become post-humans of the kind our ancestors might have worshipped, armed with sub-attotechnology and wielding the raw forces of coloured gravitonics and suchlike, we will only be like the gods of ancient Assyria and Achaia and other such old powers.
We will just be humans writ large and strange (or small and stranger), but still humans, attempting to bootstrap our way out of humanity and still being tightly shoelaced via leather to our soles. Or souls, whichever.
In tracing our paths to the stars and the uttermost bounds (or boundlessnessess) of the universe, all we will be doing is extending the wheelruts of a cart drawn by aa tired ox through a dusty, sparsely grassy, valley in the high summer of Mesopotamian hills long gone.
etched with acid at 12:56:00 am
2 Comments:
You should take a look at Quentin Skinner's arguments about the relevance of the state and its importance in our globalised times: he's reacting against political scientists who embraced the death of the state for the same reasons as your "young people".
Yeah. The necessity of taking a Skinner to them pains me. But it must be done.
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