Which about sums up the obit notice that David Pryce-Jones has on NRO for the passing of Sir Patrick Leigh Fermor. I wonder if this is common to all ages; that imagining that the great men of yesteryear are passing away and not being replaced by similarly great men of our own time? Surely this phenomenon at some point has some validity to it. All of history is not one extended climb into broad, sun-lit uplands.
At any rate, I've got some good leads on a bunch of new books.
We haven't become slavering, witless brutes with knuckles upon ground, either.
ReplyDeleteYeah, but you don't tend to see that being the opposite prediction; that we'll regress until we're subhuman.
ReplyDeleteAnd I find the Brave New World prediction a lot more persuasive than either the utopian dream or the 1984-style dystopia.
What exactly in BNW?
ReplyDeleteThe idea that the totalitarian fascism will smother us with unwanted care and concern and emasculate rather than be a boot stomping on a human face forever.
ReplyDeleteI think you're biased by the experiences of your life and the limitations of your lifespan. Rugged individualists will always have a choice, even if that choice is between emasculation and breaking the law. Continual "care" from a central authority is, fortunately, unsustainable. It is not that it is merely suboptimal economically, but it is logically impossible to sustain, and will crumble faster the more insular it is in matters of trade or the closer to universality it is in scope, such that a global nanny state could probably last no more than a year, and the Soviet Union and PRC, if you'll recall, each faced 10M+ starvation deaths until finally caving a few generations later, the former to collapse, and the latter to massive free market reforms. Also, it was foreign trade that sustained those nations in the interim.
ReplyDeleteRegardless, the Internet is new. It's also neat. More importantly, it represents a huge increase in the standard of living, and equally a decrease in totalitarian power, or even the potential thereof. Also, smart phones are new. GPS units, digital cameras, mp3 players: all these things arguably improve living conditions, and did not exist 20 years ago. If we were to look back 200 years, life was bleaker still.
Morally, we (humanity) are the same we always were, with perhaps a little ebbing and flowing from time to time, but life is getting more pleasant, more prosperous, and people are better off than they were 200 years ago.