Curves

[degringolade]

Post-Impressionism / Paul Cezanne/ Forest

This is a hard one, I have really been thinking hard about Joe's original query and really am not at all certain about the idea that there is an "answer" that pleases me much.  This is probably because I have lately been trying on the idea that there is a "right" answer to the query.

I took the time to go and look up an article that kinda pissed me off in the long ago, but the more that I have been chewing on problems lately, I am thinking that the fucker might be right.

http://archdruidmirror.blogspot.com/2017/06/the-coming-of-postliberal-era.html

I think that what is happening then and what happened then is a conflict in values camouflaging a conflict in interests.   I also think that the camouflage is becoming threadbare in a lot of places.

Back in school, before I graduated I did some research on Kondratiev cycles and I kinda liked the idea that the structures of society are based on the rise and fall of technologies and the cultural dependence on new technologies for growth.  As Joe is fully aware, and we have discussed many times,  I see the progress of our total race as cyclical rather than progressive.

Over the years I came up with the idea that the major, structural events in the American experience can be fit into a cycle roughly analogous to that of Kondratiev.

1770-1790  Initial peak of cycle

1850-1870  Second peak of cycle

1930-1950  Third Peak of cycle

2010-2030  Current Peak of cycle

I will leave it for an exercise for you to remember what was happening in those periods.

(note as background:  Thought that I was a fucking genius for coming up with this, but a couple of years ago a couple of assholes wrote a book named "The Fourth Turning" which used the exact same theory.  As an aside Joe, the reason that I handed you five eagles a couple of years ago is because I bet on the front part of the peak rather than the back part....)

I think that a lot of the time the statements in the initial request for responses are valid for the most part.  I think that a serious 1,000 word essay could be written for each of the assumptions being made in those two sentences.

So, as a simple answer to your question, I agree that those two sentences are an excellent "sound bite" description of what is happening in the here and now.

But as always, the devil is in the details.

Comments

On conflicts of interests

[keithhuddleston]

The leading premise of the JMG piece is just plain wrong. Greer is the one being anachronistic.

With the exception of The Prince, it is hard to think of a single example of anyone saying anything different. The Reformation and its fall out was about values. You don't smash people's icons out of interests. People were burned because they were seen as just wrong. From that point forward, and again, even before that point, there is no way to construe the history of the West as simply people talking through interests without recourse to value talk.

Greer writes "Values, in the thought of the time, belonged to church and to the private conscience of the individual; politics was about interests pure and simple."

This presumes that there was a separation between church and state throughout history -- the exact opposite of the reality up until two decades before American cultural liberalism (1791 -- Bill of Right, 1815 -- end of War of 1812).

It'd be accurate to say values are used as ways to get people to go against their material and even occasionally social interests -- but that would be true both the era of Liberalism as well as the rest of history. But Greer is trying to make the era some aberration. But value articulation is so fundamental to politics, that there is very little proof that any movement can work for long simply talking about "interests, plain and simple."

Re: On conflicts of interests

[degringolade]

But value articulation is so fundamental to politics, that there is very little proof that any movement can work for long simply talking about "interests, plain and simple."

OK Keith. Explain Capitalism?