Back to interesting ideas.
Heather Cox Richardson recalls Y2K, 25 years ago on January 1st, and how since the problem was fixed (by the scientists and tech guys) some people felt the problem had never been real. As always, she provides straightforward discussion of the background and circumstances, including the religious doomsayers who thought — as they did the previous millennium — that the world was about to end. Key point:
Heather Cox Richardson: January 1, 2025
Crises get a lot of attention, but the quiet work of fixing them gets less. And if that work ends the crisis that got all the attention, the success itself makes people think there was never a crisis to begin with. In the aftermath of the Y2K problem, people began to treat it as a joke, but as technology forecaster Paul Saffo emphasized, “The Y2K crisis didn’t happen precisely because people started preparing for it over a decade in advance. And the general public who was busy stocking up on supplies and stuff just didn’t have a sense that the programmers were on the job.”
Something similar happened earlier with the “ozone layer” over Antarctica. And if sufficient measures were being put into place right now to avoid the worst of the climate crisis, cynics a century from now will claim the problem never existed. Sometimes, as I think I’ve said, if the bull doesn’t get into the china shop, some people won’t believe in the bull.
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A political commentator admitting he was wrong.
NY Times, James Carville, 2 Jan 2025: James Carville: I Was Wrong About the 2024 Election. Here’s Why.
Again, I usually decide to post something here before I’ve actually read it. This helps avoid confirmation bias; I want to know what Carville actually says (and to see if it’s anything different than all the ‘explanations’ floated by others back in November about why Harris lost).
Here’s Carville’s opening:
I thought Kamala Harris would win. I was wrong. While I’m sure we Democrats can argue that the loss wasn’t a landslide or take a little solace in our House performance, the most important thing for us now is to face that we were wrong and take action on the prevailing “why.”
I’ve been going over this in my head for the past two months, all the variables, all the what-ifs, all the questions about Joe Biden’s re-election decisions and what kind of Democrat or message might have worked against Donald Trump. I keep coming back to the same thing. We lost for one very simple reason: It was, it is and it always will be the economy, stupid. We have to begin 2025 with that truth as our political north star and not get distracted by anything else.
The irony is that by most standard economic measures, the US economy is quite good, and better than the economies of European nations. The US has recovered better than they have from the slump of the Covid pandemic; we’ve avoided recession; unemployment is down, inflation mostly tamed. (People have short memories and forget there has *always* been inflation, and don’t remember or know how high it was the ’70s and ’80s.) The lesson I take is that people are guided by perceptions about things that are not true. And this is increasingly exacerbated by a necessarily complex, global society that works differently than the ways people run their households. In turn, politics is about narrative, not facts and figures. Carville:
Although the U.S. economy remains the strongest in the world, with G.D.P. soaring and inflation subsiding, the American people did not settle for us being better than the rest or take that as good enough. Mr. Trump, for the first time in his political career, decisively won by seizing a swath of middle-class and low-income voters focused on the economy. Democrats have flat-out lost the economic narrative. The only path to electoral salvation is to take it back. Perception is everything in politics, and a lot of Americans perceive us as out to lunch on the economy — not feeling their pain or caring too much about other things instead.
To win back the economic narrative, we must focus on revving up a transformed messaging machine for the new political paradigm we now find ourselves living in. It’s about finding ways to talk to Americans about the economy that are persuasive. Repetitive. Memorable. And entirely focused on the issues that affect Americans’ everyday lives.
But again, it’s not about the American people deciding not to “settle”; most Americans focus on the price of eggs, say, and have no idea about the economies of the rest of the world. Carville goes on with specific ideas. Oppose tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans, and so on; raise the minimum wage, and so on. And then, some acknowledgement of the current media landscape:
Finally, Democrats must trudge headfirst with this economic agenda into the new media paradigm we now live in. I am an 80-year-old man and can see clearly that we are barreling toward a nontraditional and decentralized media environment. Podcasts are the new print newspapers and magazines. Social platforms are a social conscience. And influencers are digital stewards of that conscience. Our economic message must be sharp, crisp, clear — and we must take it right to the people. To Democratic presidential hopefuls, your auditions for 2028 should be based on two things: 1) How authentic you are on the economy and 2) how well you deliver it on a podcast.
He closes: “We live or die by winning public perception of the economy. Thus it was, thus it is, and thus it forever shall be.”
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From a while back. The writer is also a high-end advice columnist for the New York Times, with a weekly column in the NYT Magazine called The Ethicist. He “teaches philosophy at New York University and is the author of ‘The Lies That Bind: Rethinking Identity.’ This piece is adapted from his 2024 acceptance speech for the John W. Kluge Prize for Achievement in the Study of Humanity, which is awarded every two years.”
Washington Post, Kwame Anthony Appiah, 4 Nov 2024: Fallibilism can break America’s political fever, subtitled “Accepting that we are all prone to error will not end our political disputes. But it could make them less toxic.”
A piece that invites you to reconsider your assumptions, as perhaps the best philosophy should do. Step outside yourself. The essay begins:
I want to make the case for the power of thinking in the third person. The first person, of course, comes quite naturally to us. We have a vivid sense of our experiences and perspectives: This is who and what I am. People will live their lives with “main character energy.” Yet, with a little more work, we can also view ourselves the way historians and social scientists might: as creatures shaped by larger forces and bound by a culture’s pre-written scripts. That means seeing ourselves as the inheritor and inhabitant of various social identities — and, therefore, as a person like every other.
…
I’m not claiming that we can calm the so-called identity wars by an act of intellectual discipline. Yet the human capacity to think in the third person, to abstract away from our individual particularity, has proved immensely powerful in our social and political history.
Think about the development of liberal toleration in early modern Europe. Religious tolerance, as moral philosophers have noted, requires you to see what you’re tolerating as, in fact, a religion. That abstract category did real work — and it hadn’t been around very long. No word in the biblical scriptures or in the Quran quite corresponds to our concept of religion. An act of imagination, in other words, was required to conceptualize other people’s sacred beliefs and practices as religions rather than just heresies or errors.
Yes, I think most of the ancients, and medievalists, had no conception of “religion” — they just accepted their culture’s beliefs as given.
What brought down the curtain on a long, bloody era of religious warfare in Europe, then, was a form of tolerance that required stepping outside yourself. Societies confronted by internal diversity increasingly accepted that others were entitled to live by their own understandings. But to do that, you had to adopt an outside perspective and see your own understanding as one understanding among others. And that slow revolution changed everything.
He cites Peter Singer and morality’s expanding circle, and Michel de Montaigne.
The liberal fallibilism he espoused was the need to recognize, from an outsider’s perspective, that one is subject to the same tendency to error that one sees in others. Some of the ancient skeptics had concluded that one should avoid belief and strive to suspend judgment. But Montaigne’s more reasonable view was that we should use our natural capacities to form judgments while remaining always open to the possibility that we are wrong.
And concludes,
Our differences are real. Gender, sexuality, color, class, creed, country, culture — all such categories can bring some people together and keep others apart. You’re bound to look at the world from somewhere and as someone, a person with a specific set of identities, a particular perspective.
Yet you also have the capacity, as a human being, to stand at a certain distance from yourself and grasp that you are a person among persons, and that others, like you, may be entitled to make their lives in the light of their own aims and their own understandings. Once that happens, there are conversations to be had — in the first person.
Dare I mention, yet again, that one of the powers of science fiction is to consider other perspectives. How aliens might perceive the universe ideally transcends the differences among humans.
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Reading today: another 50 pages of Lakoff. This is an interesting book because he is describing politics along models developed by “cognitive scientists” that seem plausible, but without any reference to the evolutionary rationales for why these different political attitudes have come to exist. That is, it’s an example of thematic convergence. Let me quote a bit, his take about conservatives. Keep in mind this book, THE POLITICAL MIND, was published in 2008. Before Trump.
Conservative thought has a very different moral basis that progressive thought. It begins with the notions that morality is obedience to an authority — assumed to be a legitimate authority who is inherently good, knows right from wrong, functions to protect us from evil in the world, , and has both the right and duty to use force to command obedience and fight evil. He is “the Decider.” Obedience to legitimate authority required both personal responsibility and discipline, which are prime conservative virtues. Obedience is enforced through punishment. In large institutions, there will be a hierarchy of authority, used, among other things, to maintain order. Loyalty is required to maintain the hierarchy. Freedom is seen as functioning within such an order: As long as you follow the rules laid down to you, you are free to act within that order…
Lakoff’s key theme is that the notion of pure reason idealized by the Enlightenment thinkers is false, because they didn’t know how the human mind works. But this idea, perhaps only since Lakoff wrote, that reason is modulated by emotion, has become common thought. But I’m getting ahead of myself; I’ll keep reading the book and post a summary and review once I’m done.
