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The flood of new writing - blogs, institutes, seminars, international meetings - it is hard to keep up. Each addition means each person has more choices, a new choice is competing with other new choices, and the result is we are more defuse, distributed, dispersed from each other. Coherent communication is becoming more difficult
I am thinking of it this way. We have spent years building the Sandcastle of modern society. Assuming is stable, but unaware of the tides that are This is the kind of article that I had to get one discussion, and probably will not. If you put this in the context of Gibbon’s, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, you can see the possibility of a major civil conflict emerging through the election in 2024.. As the sand castle falls apart each grain moves apart from most of the others, and connections become more random.
Not only do oil companies executives want to sustain their activity, but so too do “progressives” who are not paying attention to the obvious fact, at least ought to be obvious, that their project produces CO2, if only in the form of electricity needed to run their computers and they want to hold onto their activity to try making it successful without realizing that the connections that they create help stabilize. society, which sounds good, but makes change harder.
David Brooks has an important article in the New York Times.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/02/opinion/trump-meritocracy-educated.html
saying that the professional class, which had taken over the Democratic Party, is systematically undermining the middle and lower class. This is the kind of article that ought to get more discussion, and probably will not. If you put this in the context of Gibbons, class analysis in Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, you can see the possibility of a major conflict emerging through the media of the election in 2024.
Toynbee’s Study of History shows how civilizations (not nations) come into conflict as elites and proletariat diverge in interest. Toynbees’ large scale is complementary to the more detailed texture of the lives of leaders provided by Gibbon’s Decline and Fall. These are the kinds of things we should be reading and discussing. And are not.