Burst Your Bubbles

Many Leftists seem to do nothing -- or at least nothing publicly -- but dispute teeny-tiny points of theory with other Leftists, points which hardly add up to a flea-fart. They've been living in Leftist bubbles. As opposed to, oh, say, observing capitalists and conservatives, their ostensible opponents, for years they've hardly ever heard or read a word which wasn't spoken or written by other Leftists, many of whom have been living in similar bubbles. The reason I can't find the connection between what they say and McConnell or Merkel is because there is no connection. They'd say: Mitch who? Angela who? and snarl at me for interrupting their tirade against what they assert is a laughably inconsistent description of the deconstructionist challenge to synoptic analysis brought forth by another inhabitant of their bubble. What smart grid? What demonstrations? What brown coal? Fracking, what's that? What minimum wage? Where was I? Now, as LaCapra has asserted...

There's a Leftist blog whose only theme seems to be that a certain Leftist publishing house is corrupt and capitalist. The accusation is contained in the name of the blog. I wonder whether the publisher did anything to anger the blogger besides refuse to publish his or her work.

It's not just Leftists who inhabit bubbles, of course, although it was a look around the Leftist blogosphere which got me thinking about bubbles over the course of the past few days. And of course not all Leftists are bubble-dwellers: some observe non-Leftists, and get out of doors now and then and look around and what have you -- which of course makes them targets of hasty and horrified dismissal by the bubble-dwellers, who have no idea what they're talking about. (What agrarian uprising?) I lived in New York City for a few years, and was struck by the number of people I found who very rarely went more than two or three blocks away from their homes -- with the exception in some cases of a subway ride to and from work, but in other cases their jobs were within the three-block-square bubble as well. I rarely left the city, which you might think of as bubble-dwelling as well, but I roamed all over that city, finding fascinating things all over and being appalled at the thought of living there and never wanting to roam more than three blocks from home.

And of course there are all sorts of Internet bubbles: people who log time on one social-network site or among the comments of one news outlet or on a forum or discussion group as if it were a full-time job. I've done a little bit of that -- and fled a few such sites when I saw what I was doing.

A news-and-analysis TV show on which the host will every day ask several questions of the "Don't you agree that [long involved assertion] ?" format, asked of a small group of regular guests chosen because they will reliably almost always, in fact, agree -- that's a bubble. And it's one-half to three-quarters or more of a lot of news-and-analysis shows, even some of the better ones. And it's boring, even if I agree. An hour's worth of that with six people all agreeing could be done much more efficiently and usefully, in my opinion, by the host by him- or herself in about 5 minutes -- 5 minutes, I could agree or disagree, or even -- imagine such a thing! -- be uncertain and induced to ponder, while I get on with whatever's next.

But it wouldn't satisfy the craving for the bubble, the neighborhood, the cadre, the party within the party, the tribe.

Paradigms

The other day I was reading some things by André Gorz --his political-economic, or ecological writings, as he sometimes referred to them. Not Letter to D: A Love Story,which might be really great for all I know, but I'm not interested in it right now -- and not for the first time I was exhilarated by Gorz' great good sense, and at the same time deeply discouraged by what seems to me to be the great distance between such good sense and most people's even allowing themselves to consider such topics, let alone agree with Gorz. I'm a very enthusiastic reader of Gorz, and I would encourage everyone to take a look at such books as Ecology as Politicsand Farewell to the Working Class,although I am not a Gorzist in the sense that many people have been Marxists, inasmuch as they have treated Marx's writing as holy texts, claiming that All The Answers Are In There. (Marx himself said that he was not such a Marxist, but the Marxists have overlooked that passage in Marx just as other believers overlook whatever they have to so as not to have to actually think for themselves.) You don't have to agree with Gorz about everything, but I think it would be very helpful if more people began to think about the topics he raises.

Among these is setting limits to economic growth. This is already quite a familiar topic to ecologists (and meteorologists), but it does not compute for many economists, because much of economic theory still is predicated on constant growth. Well, we're beginning to burn the Earth to a crisp, and so we need to start thinking about this. Soon. Now. Ecologists have been thinking and talking about it for decades, but they haven't been getting through to most economists and leaders of politics and industry. Al Gore is one of the exceptions, and for his trouble he got the Nobel Peace Prize and became a laughingstock among most economists and politicians, even as the effects of global warming he and other ecologists have warned about have been coming to pass. The problem is that there is such a separation between ecological and economic thought. Gorz, unlike most ecologists, including Gore, unfortunately, has a profound grasp of the economic theories which have been put in place by the world's leaders, he understands their jargon, he understands their concerns, and he responds to them in ways they can readily comprehend. It's not very often you see an ecologist who is also an economist.

What Gorz writes about -- along with some other New Leftists -- is a paradigm shift in economics, away from the obsession solely with quantity and toward the deeper concept of quality. To this day economics is dominated by the concern with quantity and with growth and ever more growth. We've come to realize that we are endangering ourselves by burning too many petrochemicals and clearing away too many forests and wetlands and paving too much of the Earth -- but we keep on doing it. The economic markets continue to behave as if no-one had ever heard of air pollution or global warming or extreme weather, because they continue to be based on the criterium of quantity, that more is always better. This mentality is not merely absurd: it also often rewards people who frankly are just not bright enough to realize that it is absurd. William Gaddis' novel JRunderscores this point by making its title character and odious protagonist an 11-year-old boy -- and not even a remarkably bright 11-year-old -- who becomes a financial titan by observing other Wall Street titans and doing what they do. (He's surrounded by highly-cultured and sensitive adults, and when they occasionally notice and are appalled by what JR is up to, he replies, "That's what you do!")

A paradigm shift in economic thinking, from quantity as the goal to quality, would make this a much better and more satisfying world. Oliver Stone's second Wall Streetmovie, with Shia LaBeouf, Carey Mulligan and Josh Brolin, makes this point in Stone's typically un-subtle way. The original Wall Streetfrom 1987, in which Charlie Sheen dueled with Michael Douglas, had more subtle hints of this conflict between a paradigm of quantity and one of quality -- more subtle perhaps because at the time Stone was only subconsciously aware of it. I don't mind Stone not being subtle: he's trying to make people think, and in such an effort subtlety is not always called for. The examples of the Soviet bloc have shown us that it's extremely difficult to force entire nations to behave in their own self-interest. I don't believe that broad-scale paradigm shifts can be brought about in such a top-down forced manner. I think that education has to be improved, that that's the only way that the human race can be saved from itself.