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Welcome to the "neomedieval era": are states becoming obsolete?
- amadeuspagel 3y agoIR is obsolete. The idea that we can understand the relations between states in the context of new technologies by looking at past examples is obsolete. Imagine a field called CR (corporate relations) where people try to understand the relationship between Apple and Google by looking at the relationship between the dutch and the british east india company. Absurd.
- anon291 3y agoI mean... All of these things would be understandable if we actually studied the humanities. Not the modern humanities foisted upon us today but real classical humanities.
- cocacola1 3y agoI'm trying to figure out what this means but can't. Are you implying the people of the past had some huge secrets figured out?
- harimau777 3y agoIt's possible that they are referring to humanities based on classical Greek and Roman thought and the idea of a "Western Canon". Perhaps in contrast to modern humanities that emphasize also understanding non-Western cultures.
- pyuser583 3y agoIt’s not “old Western” against “new non-Western.” Lots of “old Western” ideas are Islamic, and plenty of new ideas are very Western. Barthes, Chompsky, T.S. Eliot and Foucault are as Western as you get.
- anon291 3y agoThat's right. We shouldn't think of the ancient classical Canons of Afro-Eurasia as separate. They all knew of each other and drew on each other, even if they have their distinct expressions.
- pyuser583 3y agoCanons of Afro-Eurasia … I’m curious what you mean by that! Are you taking about “Mediterranean Civilization?”
- anon291 3y agoA Western Canon would be better than the modern canon we have, but really any classical Canon would be more sufficient, whether it be Greco-Roman, Persian, Indian, Chinese, etc. All these cultures had great thinkers whose philosophies elucidate basic universal realities on human nature.
- pyuser583 3y agoI’m going to guess the poster meant studying Aristotle, Plato, Herodotus, Thucydides, Plutarch, etc. Rather than more modern theorists. If that’s what the poster meant, I strongly agree. If I could push a button requiring all students to take four years of Plato, I’d smash that button again and again.
- anon291 3y agoYes... this is what I meant. People don't read the classics. Classics aren't good because they're old. They're good because they're the original 'good reads 5 star review' except it's even better because you're taking votes from dead people too. It's not just the Greek greats either. The same basic approach to human behavior has been discovered by all great cultures. The Indians, the Persians, the Chinese, etc... all of them knew how humans acted and wrote endless treatises on it. At the end of the day... people act the same. When you read 1000-year-old stories and realize people then behaved the same way now, you start to understand the things that make people tick. It's not going to be any different tomorrow than it is today. People do not change. Yes their circumstances do, and if you look only at the response you might conclude they actually changed, but the way in which people respond rarely change substantially. > people try to understand the relationship between Apple and Google by looking at the relationship between the dutch and the british east india company. Absurd. Of course, we shouldn't look at apple and google and think the dutch and british east india company would be the same. They're different. But what doesn't change is people and yes, you can look at the people behind the companies and they will probably all act the same. Corporations are not people; people are people.
- anon291 3y agoNo. I'm implying that they had some stuff figured out and we waste a lot of time rediscovering the same basic impulses that underlie all human behavior. It's like... Newton didn't understand gravity better than we did today, but imagine if you throw out all knowledge from physics developed prior to 1950 and then tried to reconstruct it. Would you agree it's a waste of time? And yet, we've basically done that with humanities education. The great classics are seen as wastes and we've substituted them for vapid books without any important insight into human nature. Or worse, a very contemporary surface-level observation of human nature.
- germinalphrase 3y agoNothing is preventing anyone from studying those ideas.
- 082349872349872 3y agoit's even easier than before with the internet. > δυνατὰ δὲ οἱ προύχοντες πράσσουσι καὶ οἱ ἀσθενεῖς ξυγχωροῦσιν — Θουκυδίδης
- pyuser583 3y agoStudying classical humanities requires instruction. You can only go so far on open videos.
- harimau777 3y agoI'm not sure, are you being sarcastic? It seems to me that we could almost certainly gain insight into Apple and Google's relationship by looking at the relationship between historical megacorporations.
- smoothjazz 3y ago[flagged]
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- roenxi 3y agoI liked the article so much I'm not really going to talk about it. Go read it, it is worth it. But one thing they say is that the US "appear weaker than ever" and that is underanalysing how the US's success over the last century was, in some sense, forced upon them. The main European powers neutered themselves through what looked a lot like a big civil war. This also dealt a serious blow to Russia, who then finished the job by spending decades trying to make Communism work. Japan trashed China, then China neutered itself through a big civil war, then finished the job with decades of trying to make Communism work. India was left in an odd spot after British colonialism, but they seem to have tried socialism as their major strategy and that didn't bring them up to a high living standard. Africa never got themselves organised (the Europeans may have been involved in that). The Middle East was in disarray after the Europeans had dismantled them in WWI and never got organised. So by virtue of being democratic enough that they didn't melt down, the US was left standing ascendant with a horrified expression as they tried to figure out why everyone else kept destroying their own infrastructure. "Won't someone please think of the buildings??", asked wealthy US capitalists. Really they were a bit proactive through all this, but lunatic foreign ideologies were much more of a driver than US policies. It is hard to convince large groups of humans to do sane things.
- GolfPopper 3y ago>So by virtue of being democratic enough that they didn't melt down Also, don't underestimate the value of being a highly populous country on a prosperous landmass largely isolated from the rest of the world by a lot of ocean.
- 082349872349872 3y agoJFK tried to construct a system that did not involve (at least explicit) US hegemony. But he was canceled. https://www.jfklibrary.org/archives/other-resources/john-f-kennedy-speeches/inaugural-address-19610120 https://www.jfklibrary.org/archives/other-resources/john-f-k...
- LAC-Tech 3y agoAfter all these years I still can't take the term "Jan 6 Insurrection" seriously. Not only did it pose zero threat (no military support, no political support, no police support), the most notable act of violence was one of the un-armed "insurrectionists" being fatally shot in the back while climbing through a broken window.
- felixgallo 3y agohttps://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/05/us/politics/jan-6-capitol-deaths.html https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/05/us/politics/jan-6-capitol...
- LAC-Tech 3y agoPosting a NY Times article in response to Jan 6 is like posting a Russia Today article in response to Maidan. Also, I don't have a subscription.
- harimau777 3y agoWhat sources would you accept?
- jevoten 3y agoI'll summarize the article: Ashli Babbit, the Trump supporter shot by Capitol police. Kevin Greeson, the Trump supporter that died of a heart attack due to natural causes during Jan 6. Rosanne Boyland, the Trump supporter that "appeared to have been crushed in a stampede of fellow rioters" (more accurately, was claimed to have been crushed, by prosecutors), actually died due to an amphetamine overdose. No crushing/trampling injuries are mentioned. Benjamin Philips, the founder of a pro-Trump website called Trumparoo, died of a stroke. Officer Brian D. Sicknick died of "multiple strokes that occurred hours after [his] confrontation with the mob. The medical examiner added, however, that “all that transpired played a role in his condition." What the NYTimes omits from this article, but is found in the NYTimes article they cite, is: "an autopsy found no evidence that Officer Sicknick had an allergic reaction to chemicals or any internal or external injuries, the medical examiner, Dr. Francisco J. Diaz, told The Washington Post" Officer Jeffrey Smith of the Metropolitan Police Department killed himself after the attack. Officer Howard S. Liebengood of the Capitol Police also died by suicide four days afterward. So precisely zero deaths caused by the Jan 6 rioters. Keep this in mind when you see the riot called "deadly". https://www.city-journal.org/insurrections-and-double-standards https://www.city-journal.org/insurrections-and-double-standa... covers the hypocrisy in greater detail.
- rkagerer 3y ago[flagged]
- cocacola1 3y agoYou mean the links?
- mp05 3y ago[flagged]
- zzo38computer 3y agoIf you can turn off CSS in the browser you use, then you can avoid the problem of them wanting to mark links differently. (I commonly disable CSS for this and other reasons.)
- rkagerer 3y agoOh, that's what that is. Thanks! (Ps. There was a timely article on HN recently about UI tweaks that don't meet a user's learned expectations).
- edg5000 3y agoThese are called Hyperlinks. They are used in documents written in the Hyper Text Markup Language, transferred using the Hyper Text Transfer Protocol. By connecting our microcomputers together globally, it is possible to exchange documents. Some people call this "Internet", as in "International Network". It's an up and coming technology. Some people say that it may one day transform the way the world works. Welcome to 2024.
- slibhb 3y agoInteresting article but I'd be more cautious about projecting current trends into the future. If history teaches us lessons, one of them is surely that the masses sometimes prefer war. Americans may be doves or isolationists today (with Iraq and Afghanistan recent in memory) but if US adversaries push too hard, if there's some large scale terrorist attack (or even just a viral incident), the US public will become hawks overnight. It's exactly at moments when we start asking questions like "are states becoming obsolete?" that we should start to worry.
- Erratic6576 3y agoYeah a terrorist attack like the Maine in 1898 (or twin towers in 2001) can turn Americans into hawks. They’d accept whatever in order to revenge an attack against a vessel. Sounds like shock doctrine at play
- euroderf 3y ago> Yeah a terrorist attack like the Maine in 1898 (or twin towers in 2001) can turn Americans into hawks. Not just that. Also gullible and manipulable. Putting tremendous power in the hands of those who would abuse it.
- epups 3y agoI like the article, but I feel that it could have been written 50 years ago as well. Russia being led by a despotic leader, proxy conflicts, lack of social cohesion, those are all things we have seen before in the 70's and in other points in modern history. The US even had trouble mobilizing for WW2, despite the central government trying to push for it.
- vvpan 3y agoWhat I find most upsetting is the return of "great leader" - some overconfident old man who loves power. Putin, Jinping, Trump, Orban, Modi, Netanyahu etc. are detestable phenomena that won't lead to no good. How did we get here? Crisis of ideology? Counter-reaction to relative social liberalization? In a more controversial phrasing I'd call it "the return of the big penis".
- wizardforhire 3y ago> More like the small…
- BlueTemplar 3y agoIn the immortal words of Team America : World Police... https://youtube.com/watch?v=E7Sr-cpFwUc https://youtube.com/watch?v=E7Sr-cpFwUc
- vsnf 3y agoWas it ever gone? Much of the world never got over this phenomenon, even if the western nations in the aftermath of WW2 kind of did, and even that was arguably just an anomalous period of time. The open questions for us now are, can this anomaly be turned into something truly permanent and if so how, or is regression to the historic status quo basically inevitable?
- PeterisP 3y agoYes, even for "western nations in the aftermath of WW2" we can look at Spain and Portugal with Franco and Salazar as counterexamples, as well as some post-war leaders in e.g. USA and UK.
- burningChrome 3y agoKind of interesting you included the guy who you said loves power but somehow never started any new wars, keep all the other dictators on the list in check during his time in office and ended several long standing conflicts we were engaged in the Middle East and safely and effectively brought our troops home. He also normalized relations between Israel and its Arab neighbors. An accord that has withstood the current Israel/HAMAS conflict and remains intact. Now that the guy who loves power is out of office? Putin has invaded Ukraine, HAMAS has attacked Israel, Iran proxies have committed over 150+ attacks on our troops and China continues to threaten Biden with an invasion of Taiwan. But he was sending out mean tweets, so that makes him "detestable" in your book amiright?
- hakdbha 3y ago[dead]
- trashtensor 3y ago> its framing of the world as an ideologically driven competition between democracy and autocracy What an absurd, meaningless way to frame the current moment.
- TimJRobinson 3y agoIt is amazing how prescient the book "The Sovereign Individual" is despite being written in 1997. I recently re-read it and it's spot on with what's been happening lately. Highly recommend if you want to better understand how the internet is changing society and causing nation states to lose their grip.
- edg5000 3y agoIt's true that looking at country borders sometimes gives a false impression to how human societies on Earth are divided. I really like looking at this World Population Density map[0] that I found online, things look very different when ignoring country borders and looking where the people actually are. [0] https://luminocity3d.org/WorldPopDen/#3/20.00/10.00 https://luminocity3d.org/WorldPopDen/#3/20.00/10.00
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- 082349872349872 3y agoRather than "neomedieval" I'm still with Oceania, Eurasia, and Eastasia (although it looks like russia is more likely to fall into the Eastasian orbit than be masters of Eurasia). Brexit has restored the rightful position of Airstrip One in Oceania, and even the "disputed territories" are more or less in mid twentieth-century geographical position. What does seem neomedieval is the resemblance of intra-Oceanian politics to Guelphs and Ghibellines, but we could equally well say Byzantine... (It may help to realise that the geopolitics of 1984 was informed both by Orwell's own You and the Atom Bomb [but how do drones affect this conclusion?] and a book by a 1920s? author whose name I've currently forgotten) https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwell/essays-and-other-works/you-and-the-atom-bomb/ https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwel...
- ohduran 3y agoI'm surprised the book Sovereign Individual is not mentioned even once in this article. The whole book engages in the same "projecting trends into the future", on the same topic. But in a more detailed way. In fact, one of the early points it makes is that the Roman Empire, when the last emperor gave way to a tribe lord that invaded Rome, officially when the empire fell, everyone pretended it didn't. Like the emperor is out, he's living somewhere else, but yeah the empire keeps going, nothing to see here. Only years later, decades if I recall correctly, did the implications of the fall of the empire truly reached culture. The shell was untouched, but the insides were rot already.
- gipp 3y agoI'm already starting to feel a big "who cares?" When it comes to the federal government in general. Everything's so calcified it feels like they're barely keeping the lights on. How many debt ceiling "crises" have completely paralyzed Congress for weeks, just in the last few years? The media barely even bothers to report on them anymore. And the rest of their time seems to be occupied by infighting or attempts at pointless symbolic dunks on the other side. For all the talk of the "deep state" it generally feels like the career bureaucrats are the only ones doing any actual governing anymore. Eventually the whole thing's just going to get too brittle to hang together. Anyway I know this is almost totally fact-free, but that's just where I'm at now. Who the hell cares who's president?
- johnea 3y agoNice to see the wing-nuts at RAND agreeing with lefty Yanis Varoufakis: https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/techno-feudalism-replacing-market-capitalism-by-yanis-varoufakis-2021-06 https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/techno-feudalis...
- donmuril48 3y ago[flagged]
- leechy 3y agoThis reads like a commercial.
- ballardedwin9 3y ago[flagged]