Conservative outrage about recognizing Asians; the Republican war on democracy; the faded dream of a global government to solve worldwide problems.
NBC News, 18 Nov 2021: New Asian American Muppet prompts CPAC president to call for defunding PBS, subtitled, “Matt Schlapp said PBS was “insane” after its show “Sesame Street” announced the addition of Ji-Young, a 7-year-old Korean American girl.”
Matt Schlapp is “the president of the Conservative Political Action Committee” and “a conservative lobbyist,” of course. He’s complaining because the world isn’t like the one in his childhood.
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Washington Post, Paul Waldman, 19 Nov 2021: Opinion: The roots of the Republican war on democracy
A decade and a half ago, Republicans took a particular rhetorical style, one characterized by apocalyptic predictions and wild exaggerations of the supposed villainy of their opponents, and moved it from the fringe into the center of their party.
Then, something surprising happened: They came to believe it. And now they’re acting on it.
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And to step back a moment, to a time when global unity seemed plausible:
Salon, Matthew Rozsa, 20 Nov 2021: “Globalist” is an epithet now — yet some of history’s greatest thinkers supported world government, subtitled, “Luminaries like Albert Einstein believed that humanity needed to unite under a world government to deal with crises.”
Today it seems unimaginable to have a serious conversation about humanity uniting under a world government to fight climate change. In the not too distant past, however, some of history’s greatest minds pointed out that powerful global institutions would need to hold nations accountable when crises emerge that threaten our entire species.
Prior to World War II, the primary thinkers on the subject of world government were motivated by pacifist ideologies. The medieval and romantic glorifications of war increasingly became outdated as technology made its human consequences more horrifying. In place of the chivalrous view of warfare, great scholars from German philosopher Immanuel Kant to English author H. G. Wells urged a federation of all nations. Their thinking was as simple as the formula which applied to the cantons of Switzerland: Urge member states to work with one another in a confederate system of government, and then make sure that the central authority has enough power to effectively prohibit armed conflict. If that structure was applied to every country in the world, the logic went, war itself could be abolished.
Kant, Wells, Theodore Roosevelt, Einstein, Bertrand Russell. And then how this applies to climate change.
I think I gave up this idea of a rational world government, despite the idealistic notions of Wells and Clarke and others, mainly because of the observation that religion will never disappear, with its inherent irrationality and hostility toward others. Some currently see the diminishment of religion — at least in Western Europe and the US — as a positive trend, but I don’t think the trend is worldwide.
And so, as some have suggested, this may be the answer to the Fermi Paradox — why astronomers have never seen any evidence of other intelligent races in the universe. The relevant solution to the paradox is that intelligent races simply do not last very long. They destroy themselves, either through nuclear war, or irrational neglect of their environment, leading to quick extinction.
