India Rising! And our decline…

We’ll go all “good news, bad news” on you, today, contrasting one of the globe’s astonishing bright spots with the decline of the erstwhile Leader of the West/

But first: Have you been floundering to get a handle on this weird time we are in?  Lately there’s been a surge of interest in my “Horizons Model” to explain why our divides - especially in America, where market enterprise does better, under democrats - have less to do with any classic “left-right axis” than how far outward - in time and space - extend your horizons of worry, hope, and inclusion. 

Why do so many of our neighbors seem drenched in fear, and thus are prey to angst-propaganda? Why do other neighbors seem obsessed with rights extension and nothing else?

Have a look at my own incantation-explanation. And - whether or not it convinces - I promise more new concepts that make you go “huh!” than anything else you’ll read this month.  

== A new leader of the renaissance? ==

Sometimes – as forecast in Earth and The Transparent Society – positive trends can be rooted in sapient use of technology.  And this may be a big one.

According to investment maven Raoul Pal: India’s Project Aadhaar became the largest and most successful IT project ever undertaken in the world. As of 2016, 1.1 billion people (95% of the population) now have a digital proof of identity, including biometrics of fingerprints and retinal scans. The next phase was to get them into the banking system. The Government fostered the creation of eleven Payment Banks, which can hold money but don’t do any lending. To motivate people to open accounts, it offered free life insurance with them and linked bank accounts to social welfare benefits. Within three years more than 270 million bank accounts were opened and $10bn in deposits flooded in.

(Note, if we did this - or even just re-opened the Post Office Savings Account system with ATMs, poor Americans would overnight be richer, no longer having to use parasitical check-cashing services. Those who have opposed this in the U.S. are evil people. Period and full-stop.)

Pal continues: "The Aadhaar card holds another important benefit – people can use it to instantly open a mobile phone account. Mobile phone penetration exploded after Aadhaar and went from 40% of the population to 79% within a few years. Payments can now be made without banks, using mobile phones, fingerprints and an Aadhaar number. And with IndiaStack it is all cloud stored and secure."

Prime Minister Modi then risked his career on a sudden ban of the 100 rupee cash notes (with 1 month deposit deadline), which pushed the largely cash Indian economy into Aadhaar and undermined corruption and the black economy. To everyone’s surprise, it worked. (Russia is now the #1 cash economy. Guess why?)

I have two quibbles with this picture: First, India was not the first country to roll out such an integrated system for its citizens and economy.  Estonia was there earlier (see e-Estonia). I would wager that Estonian consultants played a big role in formulating Aadhaar.

Second and obviously, we are propelling toward systems that could be horribly abused by national elites who control the guts of such a system. Technologies like these are unrolling in China, with added layers like “social credit” that seem chilling. 

On the other hand, as the world’s biggest (and possibly now greatest and most genuine) democracy, India is positioning herself to be the leader of the “Western Enlightenment Experiment.”  Make that “Global Enlightenment Experiment,” and hurrah for our successor!  

With the USA floundering in mania, lunacy and phase 8 of its recurring Civil War, we had better hope that the seeds of liberty, science, accountability and grownup maturity that we spread will bear wondrous fruits of freedom and productivity and factual knowledge and adventure, in better soil. 

== Ah, La Belle France ==

It’s said that history repeats, as farce. 

We’ll know in a week whether Vladimir Putin will achieve his hat trick, getting another puppet into a western presidency.  

If so, then one of you who wrote in will be a prophet. "We might see a final confrontation -- with the US, Britain, France, and Russia lining up to impose fascism on the world... while Germany and Japan defend freedom."

And India, it seems.

Who wrote this simulation we're in?

== Alas, it couldn’t last for us ==

I’ve referred before to novels that foreshadowed a possible hot phase of the recurring American Civil War. Most phases have been tepid or cool, though the 1860s fever was near devastating, and some think that the current one (phase eight, by my reckoning) could go volcanic. This was portrayed – in retrospect – by my novel The Postman, which has been receiving a surge of attention lately, for its depiction of “holnists” whose rationalizations sound very much like Steve Bannon.

(Note that the rebooted Omni-Online has featured Ten science fiction books that "changed the genre forever." Very flattered to be included on this list - though not sure I deserve to be.)

One "new civil war" novel that I’ve touted is the recent Tears of Abraham, by Sean T. Smith, that takes you through a disturbingly hot and deadly struggle against ourselves. 

Another just hitting the shelves – that I haven’t yet read – is American War by Omar El Akkad - a dystopian novel about 'a Second American Civil War breaking out in 2074, after a presidential assassination, a virulent plague arising from a weaponized virus and a militantly divided North and South. A doomed country is beset by refugee camps, guerrilla raids and relentless violence.'  In other words, a triple whammy, like the one I look back on, in The Postman."

Also worrisome, given recent absolutely proven efforts by foreign powers to sabotage our democracy and economy, is The Cool War, by Frederik Pohl.  In fact, I deem no novel to be of more immediate pertinence to any member of our defense and intel communities.  Even the popular WWIII novel Ghost Fleet does not penetrate as deeply to reveal a nasty way the whole world might turn.

== You don’t think there are world leaders that crazy-fierce? ==

“The brazen daytime slaying of a Russian politician outside a Ukrainian hotel this week brings to eight the number of high-profile Russians who have died over the past five months since the US presidential election on November 8,” reports CNN.  

Here are 10 critics of Vladimir Putin who died violently or in suspicious ways.

Hey, fools who claim “we’re no better.” How about an actual tabulation-comparison of freedom and productivity and happiness and any other measure of humanity between America and Russia?  And yes, democracy and behavior in the world?

You: "we're all the same" jerks are really something. You dropped American Exceptionalism like a live grenade, when it inconveniently pointed at your Russian pals. Sure the U.S. has  done some bad things, that we ourselves usually uncover and criticize, in order to improve. We are doing that now. With your weird choice to lead us.

Oh but clarity can be found: "In a fiercely defiant statement, White House press secretary, Sean Spicer, denied that any member of the White House staff has ever worked “in any way, shape, or form” for the benefit of the United States." (Okay, that’s a snork! But we’ll need laughs as we gird ourselves.)

== Want a clear view of the problem? ==

Last time I revealed eight underlying factors driving our current civil war. Some are deeply painful. A couple of them are even "our" fault.

A disturbing and credible description of the rock-ribbed obstinacy that underlies hard-shelled rural-white-christian-fundamentalist Red America.  It verifies what I’ve long suspected, that these neighbors and fellow citizens of ours will never admit that we are neighbors and fellow citizens. They passionately support the most opposite-to-Jesus person they could ever have found, for one reason – he galls and infuriates and hates the same smartypants types that they hate. And that's good enough to ignore everything else.

It is the same underlying – confederate – fever that has periodically tormented our national character since 1778.

This doesn’t mean we should stop empathizing! Indeed, as I described last time, one of those eight underlying reasons for civil war is deeply traumatizing -- the "theft" of our neighbors' children!

One can feel for the rural(ish) trauma that happens every June, when the local High School -- center of all life in most towns -- holds graduation. The teens who are the pride of the community hug and cry... whereupon the best and brightest then streak out of town as fast as their legs can carry them, heading toward the city strongholds of The Enemy. 

That implicit rebuke happens every single year and it must wear on the souls of those who stay behind, who thereupon create a mythology of the city-as-Mordor. A cesspit  of iniquity, lacking all the wholesomeness of small town America...

...despite the real truth about which America has higher rates of teen sex, teen pregnancy, domestic violence, divorce, STDs, unwed mothers, dropouts, gambling, alcoholism... and if you leave out a few truly dismal cities, higher crime rates. See the New York Times bestseller, White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America by Nancy Isenberg.

The remainder of Blue America pays vastly more taxes, gets less back (yet whines far less) while Red America suckles net benefits, then bitches about taxes.

Oops!  Facts are inconvenient to the narrative .  And hence...

...fact-based thinking itself becomes the enemy.

An Interesting Guest Posting...Post-Modernism, Science, and Religion

One of my interlocutors at the recent International Conference on Complexity was Blake Stacey. A very bright fellow to whom I will now give a brief guest spot, on account of some interesting books that relate to the Modernism Project.


David, I mentioned Meera Nanda's Prophets Facing Backward: Postmodern Critiques of Science and Hindu Nationalism in India (Rutgers University Press, 2003). The week after the conference, I happened to discover that this book comes with the recommendation of Daniel Dennett, who mentions it approvingly in the preface to Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon (Viking, 2006). I originally made my way to Nanda via Alan Sokal, who draws upon Prophets Facing Backward in his essay "Pseudoscience and Postmodernism: Antagonists or Fellow-Travelers?", which is available from his NYU website.

The central irony which Nanda explores is that our common notion of postmodern ideas --- science as a social construct, "incredulity toward metanarrative", all that --- which we associate with the "political Left" is really an illusion due to a Eurocentric bias. If we look farther afield than the Parisian faculty lounge, we find that these same ideas have been appropriated by fervently nationalistic ideologues. In the ivory towers of the West, "postcolonialism" is a trendy pomo thing, a way of feeling warm and fuzzy after decades of imperialist stomping over these other cultures. Uphold the validity of their beliefs! Give them affirmation, confirm their customs and their "ways of knowing".

The problem arises when actual members of these former colonies pick up the postcolonial speech habits. Fundamentally, it comes down to the question of what you do when science, whether foreign or domestic, challenges a comfortable ideology. One approach, beloved by Young-Earth Creationists, is flat-out denial. Another, more akin to Intelligent Design, is to appropriate the words but leave behind the music: by practicing a kind of epistemological judo, one can adopt the useful fruits of technology while ignoring what the basic scientific discoveries imply about your belief system. At the same time, all the people who acknowledge the abundant evidence that science **works** --- and who therefore have a default respect for the men in white coats --- have a new reason to trust your ideological pronouncements.

Sokal's essay discusses how practitioners of "alternative medicine" have done this in the United States. There's nothing quite like a dose of quantum physics to make your aura vibrate at a higher harmonic and up the effectiveness of your uber-holistic Touch Therapy! And if the Medical Establishment comes along to question the effectiveness of this Touch Therapy, then you can whip out the "all world views are valid" line. It's not as good as real scientific evidence, but it can compel a degree of belief.

Nanda addresses how this has played out in modern India. One crucial difference between quantum altie woo in America and Hindu "Vedic science" is that the nationalist practitioners of Hindu "Vedanta" **do** uphold the primacy of one worldview: Western science is merely an imperfect realization of the truths spelt out in Vedic texts millennia ago. From page 197:

" [...] the Hindu right wing is modernist in a reactionary, anti-Enlightenment way. Hindutva is gobbling up modern science by declaring the Vedic knowledge systems to be at par with modern science in rationality and credibility. Proponents of Vedic science claim the Vedas to have presaged all the advances in modern science without admitting that in fact, modern sciences challenge the metaphysical foundation of the Vedic view of the world."
Notions of "decolonialization" have found a favorable home with these people, because they downgrade the primacy of Western science and insulate the Vedic alternative from disproof. The political beliefs of the French and American postmodernists don't matter, once their ideas have been spread --- ideas which those of all political persuasions can use to rationalize the antirational. (I'm tempted to use the word "meme" here.) The propositions of this "Vedic science" would be laughable if no one believed in them. Nanda summarizes Raja Ram Mohan Roy's **Vedic Physics** (1999) in the following words (p. 114):

"Roy's book is a compendium of absurdities where references to animals mean bosons and fermions, animal sacrifices stand for quark containment, where annihilation of dark-skinned people means annihilation of anti-matter, food is matter-energy, and where the reference to 10 directions stands for superspace, so on and so forth . . . ad nauseam."

Roy's ideas, and those of Vedanta enthusiasts like him, have been adopted wholesale by the Bharatiya Janata political party (now in opposition).

Nanda's book contains large amounts of interesting stuff which is not easy to summarize. Methinks the verbal ejaculations of postcolonials, whether in American literary journals or Vedic-science textbooks, are particularly resistant to my old-fashioned linear paradigm of thought.

Blake goes on to add:

One quick note before I forget: on the subject of Ayn Rand, you should check out (if you haven't already) Michael Shermer's essay "The Unlikeliest  Cult", which was published in **Skeptic** magazine and reprinted as a chapter of his book Why People Believe Weird Things.

I was able to dredge a copy out of a Google hit parade:

Here's the money quote:

"The cultic flaw in Ayn Rand's philosophy of Objectivism is not in the use of reason, or in the emphasis on individuality, or in the belief that humans are self motivated, or in the conviction that capitalism is the ideal system. The fallacy in Objectivism is the belief that absolute knowledge and final Truths are attainable through reason, and therefore there can be absolute right and wrong knowledge, and absolute moral and immoral thought and action. For Objectivists, once a principle has been discovered through reason to be True, that is the end of the discussion.

If you disagree with the principle, then your reasoning is flawed. If your reasoning is flawed it can be corrected, but if it is not, you remain flawed and do not belong in the group. Excommunication is the final step for such unreformed heretics."

-- Blake Stacey

MY RESPONSE:

Randroids are what I call Platonists. And alas, the libertarian movement, which OUGHT to be supremely modernist and pragmatic and logical, is instead one of the modern movements most rife with romanticism, impracticality, misplaced idealism, obsessive cultism and an absolute dedication to incantations whose sole result is to provoke a drug high of indignation. Never practical and incremental improvement of markets or freedom.

Platonism is the very worst enemy of democracy and modernism because it is the romantic variant that KNOWS democracy and understands it, and yet loathes and despises it down to the very roots. It has poisoned so much of the Enlightenment and provides intellectual fiber to the mad neocon priests like Perle and Wolfowitz and other followers of Leo Strauss. True, much of their coalition is made up of OTHER enemies of the Enlightenment... neo-feudalist oligarchs and kleptocrats and future-terrified nostalgists. But these are the guys who betray us with open eyes.

see my article: Neoconservatism, Islam and Ideology: The Real Culture War

Slowly, we are coming to see that the real enemy is human nature itself, which seems always lured and tempted by certain things: Self-delusion. Incantation. Nostalgia. Self-serving demonization... and a level of self-interest that ruins markets instead of playing fair in them.

Human nature would destroy the Enlightenment, if it ever gets a chance, and snuff it out far LONGER than those same forces kept Pericleanism quashed, the first time. 2500 years of darkness. It happens so easily! The French wing of the Enlightenment got lured back into Platonism - believing you can attain truth through incantation.

Even American modernist ikons like Frank Lloyd Wright and Robert Moses gave into the temptation to become tyrannical gurus, in the wizardric tradition, rather than collaborative modernist pragmatists. Modernism barely survived their antics and the NAME was driven into the wilderness.

What a slender thread is the trail that leads from Pericles, through scattered candles of light, to John Locke and Adam Smith and Ben Franklin, who pointed us down a new path.

One that is under attack even as we speak.

I think the very unlikeliness of this event helps to explain why the stars seem so empty of intelligent
life.

And (as I have often said) this time our enemies have vowed. When it is quashed, they will NEVER let it be tried again.