industrialism

GOP duckspeakers continue to allude to the heart of this country being center-right, when in fact this country is neither center-right nor center-left. I say that because right-left notions are tied-up with political rhetoric, not always governing philosophies. The left has got into the game, as well, citing surveys that today's youth are the most progressive generation in modern American history. Regardless if there are facts or not, both are trying to mainstream their ideas on the center/moderate public. The political reality may be that the center-left coalitions are winning today, but as with many things when you take the long view, there are cycles.

The choice isn't between having a left or right cycle, but instead industrialism versus nature and tradition. We are finding out that the actuary systems that govern a lot of our fiscal choices are not all together accurate. And, in fact, given so much weight, in order to maximize profits, that it discounts the human factor. But that's what we're bring back!

In Peter Levine's post, a darker As You Like It, he conjures up Polanyi and overlays what we know about the transformation to a market economy:

In As You Like It, Celia and Rosalind are disinherited. So is Orlando, forced to flee by his rapacious landowning brother Oliver. Oliver also dismisses the old retainer Adam, treating his labor as a commodity and ignoring his family tie. The Old Duke is in Arden because he has been cast off his land. Even Corin the shepherd has lost his ancestral rights. He succinctly describes Karl Polanyi's "Great Tansformation" from the old economy based on family bonds, inherited status, and gifts, to the new one based on private property, contracts, profits, and exchange...

I don't think we can or necessarily would want to return to the "old economy", but that doesn't mean we have to accept the status quo of the modern industrial economy. For one, I think we need to elevate the status of other factors so that they are equally, and sometimes given precedence over other values.

We could put the earth first; a crazy concept I know, but let's think about how King County in the state of Washington puts this into practice. Their motto says it all, "Providing efficient, effective and innovative service." King Country is smart about city planning; in a way, they give nature ultimate rights over country property, because they need to protect their communities' watersheds, which all need to survive. This isn't anything new, however. Other countries, such as Sweden, have been developing new city planning models, which rely heavily on living within the means that nature provides for them. It's as if your mother told you to turn off the lights when you exited a room, it's not so much that it wastes money as it wastes energy.

On the other side of the Pacific ocean, Japanese anime has started to spread to young audiences worldwide. Some of the most popular animes include a theme about the conflicts between the old ways of doing things and the new ways. Many times, this theme is played out theatrically as nature versus industrialization in various fighting sequences. And what a fight it is.

Back in the U.S., we let the cowboy, frontier mindset carry us up into the dizzying heights of the economic stratosphere, only to let us fall plunging back down, without a plan to protect our fall and in complete dissary as to what has just happened. At the individual level the culprit is reckless self-interest. But what happened on a larger level is even more sinister and very correctable; we put more value on financial stocks and bonds and manufacturing products, than we did on raising healthy families and communities and managing our finite resources. Traditional values such as these are back on the rise among America's youth, which should translate into another great transformation. Remember, nothing lasts forever, and that includes our current economic assumptions.

(Then again, energy seems to always be part any human endeavor and perhaps the new economy could value energy, both for efficiency and quality, as the tangible commodity we can use to barter and trade. Just a thought.)