Did anybody actually think our civilization was organized around science?
I did when I was a kid, and I think a lot of us did. That's the thing - they teach us in school about all the good stuff capitalism has allowed for, specifically so that it takes us longer to realize that they're cherry picking what they can out of a big pile of shit. But by then hopefully we've started a family or a career or something that we don't want to lose, so they can sell us the lie of complacency and avoid ever having a new revolution. It's getting harder and harder for them to hide the smell of the shit pile, though, and people are getting radicalized younger and younger.
I would say that there was plenty of 'science' showing that European men were endowed by nature to rule over the world. "Science" replaced "the divine right of kings' which replaced 'make the best warrior the leader.'
I was just contemplating that in another thread. I had a shower thought, trying to imagine if the ancient Greek religion had survived to the present day through the industrial revolution, how their system of "god of bread, feasts and wheelbarrows" thing would have handled internal combustion engines and email. I think we've concluded that Hephaestus would be the god of magnetos, distributors and spark plugs and that Mercury would probably rule over SMS and email.
CGP Grey made a video about why the Atlantic Exchange went the way it did; Europeans arrived in the Americas and steamrolled the native populations, partially with vastly superior technology and mostly with plagues. Well, people of the old world were more advanced technologically because almost all of the animals that were ripe for domestication are from Africa, Europe or Asia. It's a lot easier to bootstrap yourself to the bronze age when you have horses, oxen, cattle, donkeys, sheep, pigs, cats, dogs and silkworms, and not so easy when maybe you have llamas. You're not going to domesticate a moose or a bison on foot with wood and stone tools, hell we haven't domesticated moose with helicopters and machine guns. They literally didn't have the horsepower to climb the tech tree.
Why did the natives die of plagues but the arriving Europeans didn't? Plagues are animal diseases that jump to humans and then become endemic in large, dense population centers. No animal husbandry, there's no source of viruses in the first place and no dense population centers in which to become endemic. Thus no "Americapox."
That's why the Native Americans were doomed. Now what about the East? China, Japan, India, Korea, hell even the Middle East and North Africa, they had horses and cattle and such, all of them can lay claim to sophisticated cultures, they had their versions of science and philosophy...so why was the Industrial revolution peculiar to the British of all people? Portuguese and Spanish inventors patented steam powered machines before the British did, so why didn't the Industrial Revolution belong to Portugal or Spain, let alone India or China?
If I were to hypothesize, I think it was a Wright Flyer moment. I use the 1903 Flyer as an example of something that happened the instant it was possible and not a day before; The Flyer barely had enough power to weight that it basically couldn't fly in density altitudes above -600 feet. It barely lifted one Ohioan a few feet above Hatteras Island in the cold of December. They didn't have the engine in December 1902 and they didn't have the weather in November 1903, they flew in December the very day it became possible.
I think maybe 1700s Britain was just rich enough from all the Wooden Ships And Iron Men they'd done, and just barely socially mobile enough to allow people like Michael Faraday to exist. Hinduism or Confucian Buddhism won't tolerate a Michael Faraday.
I didn't. I thought the enlightenment was more of a move away from superstition and toward reason, but never once did I think it addressed capitalism. I also don't remember ever thinking it was any sort of absolute movement. I mean shit, look around five minutes, we have never had a reason to think society is based on science. It's based on competing human impulses, just so happens that greed is a heavyweight champ in that ring.
Depends on the science I guess. It's more based off of macro-economics than it is environmentalism. Then companies throw in some micro economics to help finish off their enemies (working class competition).
Economics filled the void in society vacated by religion after the Enlightenment.
A mechanism of control, conjured by the ruling class, imposed indiscriminately upon the masses, protected from scrutiny, and justified by arbitrary, curated rules.
- Economists are its priests.
- Banks its churches.
- Finance its mythology.
- GDP its God.
Economics can be fixed if the rights of future generations are included in the cost of depleting natural resources.
Economics is a tool. All tools can become weapons when used in an incendiary way.
I’d like to live and participate in a society which has a robust and supportive economy, as opposed to an overbearing economy which treats society as an extractive resource.
"Feudal lords were the masters of feudalism. Capitalists, however, aren’t the masters of capitalism. They are merely the high priests of capitalism. The master of capitalism is Capital itself."
-Roderic Day, Why Marxism?
Mooby the golden calf.
the immediate needs of capital.*
Some nations get it. Angela Merkel is a physicist with a doctorate in quantum chemistry. Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo, with her doctorate in energy engineering, was a contributing author to the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. It was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007.
I’m sure there are more, but those are the first two that come to mind.
Trump had his own university, so America should be fine
That didnt stop Merkel from halting the expansion of renewables and letting German solar manufacturing go bankrupt.
The Enlightenment and Positivist narrative is problematic, even before there was Capitalism.
Many things that are blamed on previous times are actually products of the "enlightenment", later like Capitalism may as well.
Like:
"Now that we don't live in the darkness of superstition anymore and are enlightened by reason, we now know that a woman's place is in the kitchen, and black people's place is serving the white, until they are enlightened as well".I'm going to need a source for that. Because while there were attempts by some to scientifically justify their religious beliefs like racism and misogyny, the enlightenment was about following evidence without holding onto past dogma.
A lot of the enlightenment was also about bullshitting science to justify past dogma. It can't be said that it was a unified movement, so there will definitely be plenty of examples of people who were genuinely forward-thinking and had only good intentions. But pseudosciences like eugenics and phrenology were used to sell a narrative of European racial superiority, and even more legitimate ideas like evolution and psychology were twisted to fit this narrative that Europeans were somehow more evolved and developed. This in turn justified practices of colonialism, slavery, and segregation as somehow making the world a more enlightened place, under the stewardship of the enlightened peoples.
The enlightenment was like a metaphorical medicine that cured society of its superstitious past, but like many medicines, it could be poisonous if taken the wrong way.
It's exactly about those that I'm talking about.
I'll just partially disagree on the phrasing of "religious beliefs like racism and misogyny". Yes, there was misogyny in the Church, but it was not so strong before. And racism was "invented" and retroactively connected afterwards.
It's what I learned in school and through my life, but I don't have sources on that.
I think this is very true, but how do we organize a society around science? Science can tell us many important things, but it can't necessarily tell us what we should value or what is moral. There are very intelligent, educated people trying to develop moral and ethical frameworks, using critical thinking and reasoning, but how do we ensure those frameworks become the basis for society? Even in a democracy, the people can choose to adopt those moral and ethical frameworks (assuming the people are even aware they exist), but they can also choose not to. Of course that's true of any ruler, so I'm not saying that's unique to democracy, but I'm just saying that democracy doesn't necessarily solve the problem of rulers ruling unethically.
There's technocracy, but for a technocracy to function, wouldn't the technocrats need to have a fairly significant amount of power? I don't necessarily think that technocracy is completely antithetical to democracy, but the technocrats would need the authority to override the people, whenever the people would try to implement some policy that was unscientific, making the technocrats, not the people, the ultimate authority.
I think just using "science" as a catch-all term makes it harder to comprehend what a society would look like. Instead, I try and think of it by using research-backed policies.
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This research shows that providing free childcare results in better educated students, happier families, and less crime later in life.
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This research shows that having walkable cities reduces pollution, better supports small businesses, and makes our population healthier.
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This research shows that getting yearly vaccinations, washing hands, and wearing masks when sick greatly reduces the spread of germs.
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Banning abortion makes women more at-risk for dying during childbirth and ends up having families make risky decisions since a fetus isn't actually a person yet.
Then after all the research and actual peer-reviews (not just for-profit journals having a say), policies would be made to support what makes for a better society.
Then after all the research and actual peer-reviews (not just for-profit journals having a say), policies would be made to support what makes for a better society.
Policies would be made by whom, though? The people, or democratically elected representatives of the people, can choose to make policies informed by peer-reviewed research, but they can also choose to ignore peer-reviewed research entirely. Here in the US it's done all the time. Many of our politicians, and the people who vote them into office, often reject evidence and research based information that they find inconvenient or which runs counter to their world view.
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The biggest shift that can be made is to limit the competitive aspects of Markets and push for cooperation, along a common plan and goal. Markets are useful at lower levels of development for rapidly building up productive forces, but to truly take a scientific approach humanity needs to be able to take master of production to fulfill its specific needs and ends, not just for profit.
This is why the older I get, the more cynical I become about democracy. People are easily frightened herd animals who often refuse to look past the surface level shiny veneer. It always devolves. Every single democracy in history falls prey to the populist who takes advantage of this human weakness.
The modern globalist system has left you out of the manufacturing job you expected to have? Are you frightened about your financial future and your children's future? Here, I have a solution for you. We will build a wall and deport the brown people. It's all their fault. Please ignore the man behind the curtain.
Instead of us having an educated populace that sees through the wool being pulled over their eyes, they instead put their heads in the sand and choose to full-send into whatever right-wing ideology is thrown their way. It happened before, it will happen again.
The superior system, I think, would look something like the Chinese although they are not perfect by any means.
What they do is in primary school, they test the children and see who has a strong aptitude. They take these children out of the normal class and groom them to be party leaders. These party leaders then eventually end up as the leaders in the future. China actually is a pseudo-democracy- it's just that only party members get to vote. And there are actually over 2 million party members. But the difference there is that it's more of a meritocracy. There is still nepotism and whatnot, but the leaders slowly rise up over time based on results.
Look at Xi Jinping for example
He lived in a yaodong in the village of Liangjiahe, Shaanxi province, where he joined the CCP after several failed attempts and worked as the local party secretary. After studying chemical engineering at Tsinghua University as a worker-peasant-soldier student, Xi rose through the ranks politically in China's coastal provinces. Xi was governor of Fujian from 1999 to 2002, before becoming governor and party secretary of neighboring Zhejiang from 2002 to 2007. Following the dismissal of the party secretary of Shanghai, Chen Liangyu, Xi was transferred to replace him for a brief period in 2007. He subsequently joined the Politburo Standing Committee (PSC) of the CCP the same year and was the first-ranking secretary of the Central Secretariat in October 2007. In 2008, he was designated as Hu Jintao's presumed successor as paramount leader.
The way it works is you start in a lower spot and work your way up slowly over time. And he was actually destined for failure due to his father being a "traitor"
The son of Chinese communist veteran Xi Zhongxun, Xi was exiled to rural Yanchuan County as a teenager following his father's purge during the Cultural Revolution.
But his results ended up pushing him to the top anyway.
This sort of meritocratic technocratic society will always win out over our populist oligarchy. And to the doubters, consider that our system is not any less elitist.
Instead of testing children and grooming them for leadership, we do it based on last name and wealth. If your parents went to Harvard, you grow up with tutors and extracurriculars and all the support you could want. Then you are groomed for success by joining an Ivy League school, you join some sort of fraternity that presidents were a part of and you meet the future senators and CEOs.
It's the same thing except instead of results and meritocracy- it's more influenced by wealth and nepotism.
Of course I'm not claiming the Chinese system is somehow ideal, but I believe democracy is fatally flawed. Plato wrote about this in "The Republic" already countless years ago. Ironically, in his ideal Republic (which to be fair is sort of a dystopia) they actually groom capable children like the Chinese do for party leadership.
Maybe we can just develop generalized artificial intelligence and have it run our society for us. I'd have more faith in the AI than I do in our congress.
Science does serve the capital in terms of The climate crisis. The only problem is, that it doesn't serve the right capital. Investing in stopping climate change is the economically best decision you can make.
Only long term. The line MUST go up this quarter so we'll invest in the environment next quarter.
(Next quarter will never come)
That's true tho
Oftenalways ftfy.The COVID pandemic was the millionth example of this.
