2008: Empire's end

Occasional drive by poster here and once again, I'm surprised at how much I've come to appreciate your POV, though at times and on certain topics you drive me nuts.

But anyway, thanks for that endorsement of Alisdair MacIntyre--I've heard of him before, but knew very little about him. A quick glance at your weblink suggests I really ought to learn more.

This is the deal...special interests took over our government and RUINED our country. The lobbies write legislation, making certain that each and every industry gets its' own way, usually to the detriment of each and every industry! Think about it. The auto lobbyist pricks waged war against making more fuel efficient cars, and made our automakers less competitive as compared to the Japanese, therefore destroying the Big Three.
Similarly, the lobbyist pricks in the FIRE industries lobbied against regulations that would have saved us from the disaster that we are now having...and in doing so ruined their own industries in the long term(although the bastards were bailed out to come back and cheat us another day.)
The bottom line is that democracy cannot function without leadership. Our leaders have abdicated their responsibilities and they have allowed special interests to call the shots. This is insanity. I don't see how or why any person in a leadership position could behave in this manner; it's suicide.
Now, we have lost all respect for government. There is no way that we can believe in them or have any faith in them whatsoever.
It's distressing to realize that to get where we are today took corruption on a MASSIVE scale. It's sickening.
I'm sorry to have to post such negativity, and I truly wish that our leaders had had some integrity. There was really no reason for all of this stupidity, this suffering, this pain.
May God have mercy on us, and may God punish those who deserve it.

Empire? Pretentious twaddle.

In 6 years, the story will be written how a few courageous people decided to stop whining and start doing, and they turned the nation around, and set the people back on the right course of action.

After all, we're Americans. We do not depend on "empire" or "elites", nor do we as a nation sit around waiting to be fed by bankrupt politicians. Well, not unless Democrats have their way.

Right now, nobody's talking solution... But that'll come soon enough. It appears that this mass stupidity that elected Obama has to run a bit farther down the course before people finally realize how futile it is.

And which party was in power for the eight years leading up to this great debacle? >>Cackle

Happy New Year.

Rod, you shouldn't be promoting Deneen uncritically. He often represents the worst kind of ahistorical Luddism. A little dose of Julian Simon would help him (and you) a great deal.

The historical fact is that resource scarcity is a constant in human history, and that Deneen's much derided "human ingenuity" has always, always evenually found a way around it one way or another.

Just recently, as it became clear that new technology is allowing thousands of trillions of cubic feet of previously unrecoverable natural gas to be accessed, we've seen prices for that plummet and drilling greatly slow. As prices increase, drilling will and prices will moderate again. It is clear now that much of the "peak oil" hysteria of the summer was driven not by oil at all, but by speculators driven to commodities by fearfulness of other markets. That bubble has now burst too, and oil and gas are at historic lows. Last night a tank of gas that cost us $80 this summer cost $27.

There is far more oil in the earth that has yet to be recovered than has been used in all of human history to date, although much of it is hard, expensive, or impossible to get right now. If the price is right, as with natural gas recovery from shale, "human ingenuity" will find a way to get it.

All the while advances are made in other technologies: wind, solar, tidal, hydro, and the holy grail of cheap, plentiful energy forever out of water, fusion. Yes, some of these are now only impractical dreams, but so was the shale recovery of natural gas 20 years ago until George Mitchell figured out to crack that egg (and add a couple of billion or so more, much deserved, to his net worth.)

This doesn't mean the salvation of mankind; the world is a mess and will always be until God's kingdom comes. But it is also not mankind's damnation, as Deneen has it.

But Deneen (and you at times) are trying to transfer your theologically based perspective of human folly and futility, also a constant, into doomy economic prognostications of our present historical moment. But this is folly too, as the "end of the world as we know it" has been fortold hundreds of times, and has always been true and always been false. The historical and economic situation is just too complex to reduce in the way Deneen is trying to.

You guys need to wise up.

"The historical fact is that resource scarcity is a constant in human history, and that Deneen's much derided "human ingenuity" has always, always evenually found a way around it one way or another."

Utterly and completely wrong. Go and read "Collapse" by Dr Jared Diamond (He is the Pulitzer winning author of "Guns, Germs and Steel"). A number of civilizations have collapsed due to resource scarcity and mismanagement. The Anasazi and Polynesians on Easter Island have been written of extensively. The Scandinavians completely died out on Greenland, and barely hung on to Iceland. It is hubristic in the extreme to claim that humans "always eventually find a way", and it does not square with the historical record.

It seems to me that Deneen is arguing two points, which he's linked, and that perhaps it might be worth it to sever. The first is that America has hit a real tilting point in its economic health, and that this will result in an end of American empire. The second is that this tilting point is based on a false idea about human ingenuity and human domination over nature. Deneen thinks that our recent financial collapses indicate that we've reached some kind of limit with our real control over the world; I don't know that this is true, or how we can make this prognosis so soon after the fact. Large historical judgments generally take a long time to arrive at, and the short view is often inaccurate.

I don't know that either of these points Deneen makes is true. I do wish that we were more humble and realistic in our sense of dominance over the natural world and its systems that we're dependent on for our being and wellbeing. Wendell Berry regularly argues for this point, and I for one think he is right. Those crying Luddite above need to think about whether this more general point is accurate: whether we need a greater degree of humility with respect to creation than we've had for the past several hundred years.

But whether we're really at a tilting point as a nation or empire is a different judgment altogether; I can see why Deneen might want to make the connection he does, but also can see why others resist his connecting these two. But the philosophical connection Deneen sees between general human arrogance and US hubris may be true, even if his sense of the future for the USA is untrue.

Please. You could likely read the exact same post during the Gilded Age as well as the Great Depression. The Gilded age lead tot he roaring 20's and the Great Depression was followed by the unprecedented growth nearly unabated until now, and this period will likely be a blip on the map.

But stockpile your rice nonetheless. I'm having a(nother) cocktail.

Rod, this will sound scandalous and be much too broad a question, but here it goes: I'm not much into politics and was wondering if you could recommend some good reading on what it means to be a conservative politically, as well as the differences, politically, between conservatives and liberals. Thanks for your time—and your blog. -Jason