An Experiment called Civilization

essaysbysean.blogspot.com 

We are a young species on the make, and we are in the midst of a vast, millennia-long experiment called civilization that we never actually signed up for. It may succeed if we can adapt our traditional attitudes and behaviours to our new circumstances. 

Gwynne Dyer, Growing Pains, 2018, Scribe Publications

Update: of special note is Dyer's observation that there have been roughly the same number of years between WWII and President Reagan bringing in "Reaganomics,"and between Reaganomics and now. 

The economic changes of Reagan such as "the only stakeholders in the economy are the shareholders" and that wages should no longer rise as the national GDP rises, (to name just two) changes that would have been laughed at in the 1950's and '60's—even if we take them for granted now—have been measurable disasters, as documented on page 122 onwards. 

Americans should reconsider their "no longer new" model.
Sean Crawford 

Hello Reader,

Got global growing pains?

Believe it or not, I am unsurprised at today’s news.

Today, July 14, some British newspapers have a front page story from leaked diplomatic mail. The scandal is: Trump only scrapped the Iran Atomic agreement out of spite for Obama. Now governments in Europe are scrambling, Iran is giving up in disgust and is enriching uranium, oil tankers are being attacked with explosive mines—all just to… Spite. One. Man. …Really?

Yes, really, but I am not surprised because Gwynne Dyer had (roughly) said so in 2018 in his book that opens with the line, “This is not a book about Trump.” The second paragraph opens with, “We owe Donald Trump a vote of thanks, because he has inadvertently done us a great service. He is the canary in the coal mine—a giant orange canary—and he has made us aware of a growing threat to democratic societies that we should have noticed but didn’t.”

The book is called Growing Pains subtitled The future of democracy (and work) 

I knew I had to grab it, as soon as I spotted it one evening on the “staff pick table” at my favourite independent bookstore, Owl’s Nest Books. (I was there to read my fiction as part of an open microphone night) I have met Dyer, on some occasions, back when he was doing university speaking tours and I was a student reporter, or when my student club had invited him. I’m still chuckling at him joking, as we walked down the hall, “The older I get, the more I believe in conspiracy theories.” Of course the best jokes, dear reader, are always built on a kernel of truth: You’re on your own with this one.

A former naval officer, now an historian and writer, Dyer picks up lots of kernel’s because he has interesting friends and relatives all over the British Commonwealth. And Ireland: “Dyer writes with easy fluency, with gentle, teasing wit” notesThe Irish Times.

As to whether Dyer is friends with a diplomat who had to resign this month over leaks showing he had reported negatively on Trump, well, I wouldn’t know. I like Dyer as an ethical journalist-researcher, with a conscience. For example, after all the world’s investigative journalists had failed to notice the fact that no, Iraq did not have weapons of mass destruction (WMD)… Dyer had the humility to retrace his steps, republishing some of his old features, trying to determine how the entire North American press corps had blindly failed to scrutinize the U.S. government while there was still peace time, before there was a smoking gun on a tank rolling across the Iraqi border. As for US reporters who swallowed the White House pronouncements on WMD, hook line and sinker, I don’t know of any being equally humble.

Here’s Dyer’s table of contents for Growing Pains

1/ A giant orange canary

2/ Don’t touch that button!

3/ The EU and Brexit: immigrants or jobs?

4/ Democracy: default mode politics

4/ Trump: stop the world, I want to get off

6 Globalisation or automation: what killed the jobs?

7/ Growing pains

Acknowledgements

Notes

Index

If you are feeling blue, dear reader, you might contemplate the “dreary theory” that the rich class always arranges laws and national culture to oppress the nation, that rule by kings and dictators is the default for the vast majority of human history. Yes, but—Dyer points out that for an even longer time, for nearly all of prehistory, people had the camp fire equivalent of Greek forums because they lived in little bands and First Nations and tribes… And then all through historical times, judging by popular culture and religion, people still kept the old hunter-gatherer dream of social equality in their hearts.

If the west got democracy first, then, as Dyer puts it, it is not because they had Greeks in their family tree but because they were the first to get mass media, like a virtual forum, with the spread of the printing press and literacy. As it happens, the Thirteen Colonies who rejected King George had the highest literacy rate in the world. Hence Common Sense by Thomas Paine struck Philadelphia like a rocket.

Today I have to chuckle: The Great Firewall of China can keep out “western” ideas, but within the wall, how can you keep a computer literate Chinese population from having ideas with each other? As Dyer notes, “equality”—what the French called “fraternity”—is human, not western. I will know that the communists are getting desperate when they start violently oppressing Hong Kong as a last grasp for keeping power, or when they start their mobs demonstrating against Taiwan, agitating for invasion of that island country. And why not? After all, the distraction of invading the desolate sheep farming Falklands almost worked to keep the Argentine colonels in power. Almost.

Reading Dyer, I have to add a new scenario: Previously I had believed in the Korean movie Snowpiercer, where the train is a metaphor: The upper (forward train car) class, decadently dancing in a golden discotheque, are the same folks who grab awful steel chains and start grimly swinging them to oppose the workers from lower classes, when the workers tried to get (up to the engine car) a fair deal. To me, the upper class is like dishonest older siblings who will change the rules of a game, a class that will even resort to illegal violence to stay in power. That was the world of my boyhood, or of China at the time of Tiananmen Square where, as Dyer notes, the troops and tanks moved in to kill the people after dark to avoid TV cameras. The student casualties can only be estimated, no one dared to count.

But times change. In Sudan this month they could still kill peaceful street protestors, but not by using the army: No, only by using “special forces” thugs, who are despised by both the army and the people. 

What Dyer had noticed in Eastern Europe, shortly before the tumbling of the Berlin wall, was uniformed army officers in the streets among the protestors. After seeing them, Dyer no longer felt he had to stay near doorways for fear of bullets. He too went out to the middle of the street.

The newest scenario, then, is that the upper class won’t resort to mass violence, not even to keep from sharing their power, not if the masses who would keep the government accountable remain peaceful and nonviolent. So now I have two scenarios to believe in. Such are my growing pains.

Dyer’s eventual conclusion is very exciting. Dyer has perspective in time—he takes a long view—and in space—he looks at the whole economic-politico system. For example (an example he never mentions) society’s diversion of money to retirement pensions to keep old people alive was an allocation, out of a nation’s total resources, brought in by Bismark, to prevent revolution—although of course today OAS and CPP seem like a “no-brainer” in Canada. If you read my blog then I believe that you will enjoy Dyer’s book, that if you open it to any page, then you’ll find Dyer “writes with a racy style, and provokes as much as he informs.” The Independent.

By “provokes,” perhaps The Independent means that Gwynne Dyer is like that Farside cartoonist, Gary Larson. Larson refuses to be chauvinist for humans, and Dyer refuses to be chauvinist for the western world or the U.S. “party line.” For my part, as a dedicated (North) American, such amused objectivity provokes me, but Dyer is honest enough, and funny enough, that I have to forgive him. (Except, maybe, for dating his years “After Common Era” instead of A.D. (Anno Domini) and Before Common Era, B.C.E., instead of B.C. But his book, while printed in the US, is published in Australia, (and the UK) so maybe that’s understandable)

What I won’t reveal today is how Dyer walks a path to a brilliant conclusion, using stepping stones of credible research: Research statistical, research anthropological, research economic, and research medical—such as tracking mental health and lifespan. I won’t hurt his book sales or “steal his thunder” by blabbing where his steps lead him. Besides, radical Truth is hard to retain after merely reading a wee blog post; I for one have to “read a new Truth six times” before it sinks in—or else write a book review.

Dyer’s book is only about 200 big print pages. I do encourage you to pick it up and have a look.

Sean Crawford

Calgary

July

2019 

Footnotes:

~From page 178, …”What really seems to motivate Trump in all three cases is just a desire to destroy Barak Obama’s political legacy, for reasons known only to himself.”

~Brexit. Explaining that if people outside Britain are interested, then it is from wondering if Brexit is a symptom of a trend towards something like populist anger, because seriously, as Dyer writes, “Middle Sized country Makes Large Mistake: not many hurt elsewhere is not a very exciting headline.”

~As for the spread of mass communication in step with spreading democracy, I was mind-blown by Neil Postman’s “favourite” of his books, The Disappearance of Childhood. Postman connected literacy to childhood, as well as to a sense of agency in grownups. I essayed about it in Literacy Grows People archived July 2012

~If you were a US citizen, would you have voted Trump? Don’t answer too fast, because

here’s a (link) to an essay by editor David Wong of Cracked Magazine. Although now a liberal city slicker, Wong has rural relatives and memories: He can easily “method act” what it is like to be rural and voting. My two favourite quotes: 

To those ignored, suffering people, Donald Trump is a brick chucked through the window of the elite. “Are you assholes listening now?”

“But you might as well take time to try to understand them, because I'm telling you, they'll still be around long after Trump is gone.”

Editor: see update at the top of this blog.