> The basic life script we all seem to have in western society seems pretty awful when you think critically about it.
Not if you've studied much history. Modern western society is awesome compared to what nearly all of our ancestors lived through. Wanting more is good, but denigrating things that nearly anyone from history would kill for doesn't sound right.
>Modern western society is awesome compared to what nearly all of our ancestors lived through.
Any sane person would agree with you in the sense that it's definitely better to be alive in 2021 than 1621.
If you you shorten the timespan and only look at cultural changes since, say, the 1970s, though, it seems we've sacrificed a lot of what makes us human (community, interconnectedness, a sense of wonder about the future etc.) at the altar of free market economics and received little of actual value in return (Uber Eats, iPhones, Netflix etc.).
It's clear to me that it's too easy to be Panglossian about our material conditions. Just thinking about the time frame I grew up within(1980's-2000's US) there were a lot of things that I now see as definitely bad and that have, in fact, all started to change in my adult life:
* The omnipresent nature of sweetened food and drink
* Car-dependent culture
* Mass media culture
* Simpsons-style dysfunctional nuclear families
* The whole array of corrupt policies and programs, cults-in-disguise(e.g. "troubled teen" schools), and ideologically driven movements; while we're hardly free of those things, and there are plenty of new or intensified versions of them, I believe there are also more ways to find a sustainable path outside those frameworks these days.
But if you asked me if life was good in 2000, I would be mostly in agreement, because my life seemed pretty good - I was told it was! But then I look back on it and it's like, nooo, actually, there were all these pieces that traumatized me, removed my agency, were bad for my health or made me settle for less. And I believe the same would be true if I had been experiencing life in 1970's.
Like, sure, in 1621 I'd probably have died at a young age. But I am on the hedonic treadmill with respect to life quality too. It doesn't matter to my feelings that now is the best time, if better is still possible.
Is it fair to say you're citing identity politics and the presence of ideology as a cause of problems in society?
Re identity politics, I'm trans and it helps me a lot. It feels like an intermediate between misogyny and the abolition of the categorization of gender. Focusing on the rights of one group (trans rights, trans liberation now) feels essential.
Re the presence of ideology, there is no way to not have an ideology. Liberalism and neoliberalism consistently say that they are neutral, but they are also a story about the world and a way to interpret facts, on the exact same scale as Marxism. It's just that because (neo)liberalism places weight on the individual and discounts systemic factors, it can feel neutral if you don't need to think about systemic factors (this is what privelage is).
Not really relevant to your overall critique, but it's just something that stood out to me reading your comment.
You're getting at the part that I can expound a bit on :)
It's possible to engage with nihilism and say "I'm just going to survive pragmatically". It's related to the "state of nature" many philosophers will refer to as a pre-societal world. You can't have a society that's wholly nihilistic, but you can exist within society nihilistically in degrees, with the far end of that being the "off-grid live in a cabin in the woods" sort of disengagement. But even without going that far, it's also possible to engage with philosophical concepts and critiques without being ideologically attached to them.
Ideological attachment is what happens when you start converting all life events into phenomena relative to that ideology, and that's the thing that I see being shaken away from a fully normalized state("this is how the world is, there's no discussion to be had") to a vigorous, even violent argumentation(see: all the concepts you listed). And I can pinpoint that the shift happened almost instantly after the world achieved mass connectivity with smartphones, in the 2008-2012 period. Suddenly the US had its Marxists and anarchist voices emerge; trans rights became a major issue; and the "alt-right" took shape as well. We have a lot of visible ideologues in social media culture that will blame everything on the other ideology, where before those positions were buried by the consensus and relegated to subculture.
To me that makes it a "better" world in the sense of agency, because it's easier to examine the different positions. But it's also more fragmented as a society, more prone to bubbles of extremism. If my experience tracks, we're in a transitional state where many old attachments are being discarded while others are being taken up. (Since 2008, I went from being - to retroactively label things - a vagely cishet liberal, to a nonbinary asexual meta-anarchist, all terms I would have struggled with back then.)
My ideas on this mostly derive from Heather Marsh's philosophical writing, so you could say I am attached in that direction(it's equally true that I haven't been able to critique her work, in the sense that I literally just don't want to); her view coincides with that of the meta-anarchists(itself a newly emerging project of philosophical writings) which is why I now also use that as an identity label. I don't see myself as anti-identity, but I do see myself as anti-politics(despite having some occasional political engagement), because I accept Marsh's idea of there being both healthy attachments and unhealthy ones, and kicking my political attachment is like kicking a smoking addiction; I can try to curb it, but it often roars back to life if I look at the news.
People in the 1970s would have killed for smartphones (or any phone not physically tethered to a landline,) the advent of personal computers and the web making global information, communication, data and commerce available for practically nothing, and the convenience of Uber, or just e-commerce in general. Streaming media with access to an entire library of movies and television shows is qualitatively better than three analog tv channels and whatever happens to be showing at the movie theater at the time.
Maybe there's an argument to be made for a decline in quality of life since the 1970s, but it isn't going to be on the basis that technological advancements over the last fifty years have been a net negative for society.
A sense of wonder about the future? Interconnectedness? Community? The 70's were some of the most cynical and violent years in recent American history. The Cold War. Vietnam. Watergate. The oil crisis. Activist riots and radical underground groups bombing universities. The National Guard killing students at Kent state. Even the politics of the last four years seems quaint compared to the last few decades.
>People in the 1970s would have killed for smartphones...
Would they? Boomers are famous for being luddites, and a growing minority of millennials now would be more than happy to toss their smartphones if it didn't mean being pushed to the outer of all their social groups.
>Streaming media with access to an entire library of movies and television shows is qualitatively better than three analog tv channels and whatever happens to be showing at the movie theater at the time.
I agree, Netflix has a much better range than the old technology, it is more convenient and the picture/audio quality is fantastic.
The more interesting question, though, is whether or not frictionless access to near-infinite vaults of that tailored entertainment actually makes your quality of life better.
>The 70's were some of the most cynical and violent years in recent American history.
I never said it wasn't violent (nor did I say American, in fact!). But kids in that era would play together in the streets, and families had closer bonds.
Millennials don't apply to an argument about who would have done what in the 70s - every generation has people who don't appreciate the value of what they have, and I don't think everyone in the 70s was an Archie Bunker stereotype. Yes, I'm quite certain there would have been plenty of people who would have seen the value of cellphones and the internet at the time.
>The more interesting question, though, is whether or not frictionless access to near-infinite vaults of that tailored entertainment actually makes your quality of life better.
That's the thing - "quality of life" is an entirely subjective measure, one which both of us are tailoring to fit a predetermined outcome.
But even if one dismisses the value of access to media to quality of life, the degree to which online services (any service, including streaming media) democratize that access compared to the limitations of physical media and gatekept broadcasts (VCRs didn't even come around until the late 1970s) improved quality of life substantially. That some or much of that media is pure entertainment is less relevant to my argument than the paradigm shift it represents.
I mean, to invoke the trope, you have a device you can fit in your pocket which allows you access to almost the entirety of humanity's cultural and intellectual output, a GPS system, a camera, a radio, a compass, a calculator, it can answer questions, it can order food, it can allow you to communicate with people around the world without long-distance fees. From the point of view of the 1970s, that's literally something out of Star Trek. That seems like an objective improvement to quality of life in the same way that the printing press, internal combustion engine and indoor toilets were.
> But kids in that era would play together in the streets, and families had closer bonds.
Kids don't play in the streets anymore but they still play - my niece and nephew have a huge backyard they play in, and my nephew also makes games for his friends on Roblox. To me, kids today have richer and more fulfilling lives than I did, stuck in my living room watching TV and reading old library books.
Also, I would argue that due to the advancement of progressive ideals allowing certain demographics to exist more openly than society would have allowed in the 1970s, some familial bonds are stronger now than then. Maybe if you're a white Christian conservative male things seem to have gone downhill, but things seem to be looking up for everyone else.
>Yes, I'm quite certain there would have been plenty of people who would have seen the value of cellphones and the internet at the time.
And there would have been social media junkies and helicopter parents using it to make their lives worse, too. I doubt it would have been used significantly differently back then.
>But even if one dismisses the value of access to media to quality of life, the degree to which online services (any service, including streaming media) democratize that access compared to the limitations of physical media and gatekept broadcasts
I wasn't alive for the introduction of VHS, but was for the shift from tape to DVD to torrents to Netflix. The amount of media consumed increased dramatically one physical media died, and even that small amount of exercise and social interaction walking around blockbuster and thanking the guy behind the counter has been squeezed out in the name of efficient distribution.
>That seems like an objective improvement to quality of life in the same way that the printing press, internal combustion engine and indoor toilets were.
And yet I literally threw mine away and don't miss it. It was nothing but a distraction that prevented me from doing things I needed to do.
>my niece and nephew have a huge backyard they play in, and my nephew also makes games for his friends on Roblox
That sounds like my wife's upbringing in South Africa. Hardly an ideal to emulate.
>white Christian conservative male
Black families have been disintegrating even faster.
It's self-evident, and the research backs up, that our communities have all but died in the time frame you specified. However, it's not really clear, and the research I've read does not agree, that it is because of free market economics, at least not directly.
I think this subject is one of the more important ones to the US right now, and is largely ignored because it makes a lot of ideologies look bad. I'd be curious what leads you to your accusation.
>I'd be curious what leads you to your accusation.
Part of the reason I blame the free market is because of the timing, but also because many of the functions that used to be performed by the family and community are now performed by businesses.
Specifically, I think the fact that middle-class people in Western countries no longer rely on friends, family and neighbours to meet (or even augment) our material needs has changed the way that we perceive interpersonal relationships on an individual level.
Because most forms of maintaining personal relationships come with real costs (monetary, stress/expectations, time, lost sleep) but minimal tangible benefits outside of the existence of the relationship itself, our "social mammal mental accounting software" discounts their value.
The net result is that we engage with friends, family and neighbours just enough to keep the relationship alive, but no more. We're lonelier, sadder and less fulfilled.
It's pretty bleak, and I'll admit it's a pretty broad stretch of logic, but I think it's at least partially true based on both my own experiences and the conversations I've had with the people I'm close to.
> because many of the functions that used to be performed by the family and community are now performed by businesses.
I could see that being true. Do you mean businesses like Facebook and Twitter with their substitution for socializing?
I fully agree with the rest of your post. If you're interested in the subject, I would suggest reading Robert Putnam's research on Social Capital. Bowling Alone is a good synthesis (but I'd personally pass on his other books, which lean more toward polemics).
>If you you shorten the timespan and only look at cultural changes since, say, the 1970s, though, it seems we've sacrificed a lot of what makes us human (community, interconnectedness, a sense of wonder about the future etc.) at the altar of free market economics
Free market economics didn't tell people to spend less time with their families and more time consuming entertainment media. Moreover, the argument that we have culturally regressed since the 70s only makes sense from the perspective of a white male.
Advertisement can only sell something that people want. If we swapped all video game advertising with Math Olympiad advertising, we both still know which one is going to be much more popular. Games with zero marketing budgets have no problem selling millions of copies.
>Many women would disagree with you on the "male" part.
And any woman with a professional job would disagree.
> And any woman with a professional job would disagree.
My mother is going to be 70 in a few weeks, she is a highly regarded teacher of English, and in her opinion, a lot of things have gone downhill since the 1970s, and especially since the 1990s, though obviously not all of them. So there is your counterexample.
People are complicated and stereotyping them (any woman with X) is bound to fail.
It goes without saying that there is an exception to every rule, and it's a strawman to assume that I believe otherwise. By "professional job", I should have qualified that I mean careers traditionally dominated by men (e.g. business, lawyers, doctors).
Depends. There is a lot of the bad mixed with the good.
Rich societies (not just Western ones) seem unable to reproduce themselves - the TFR has gone south of 2 pretty much everywhere, with interesting exceptions (Iceland, Israel). That means that our lifestyle is incompatible with long term survival.
We also have a huge, huge health problem that might directly be caused by abundance of food. Metabolic diseases. Just count all the fat people you meet during a 10 minute walk downtown. Many of them are young and already on their way over the 300 pound mark.
I am not even starting a rant about how algorithms hijack our emotions and manipulate our behavior online.
Humans aren't necessarily built for the world we created. Yes, many things are obviously good: not dying of cholera at the age of 2, for example. But there definitely are things to denigrate in our daily life script. And we must acknowledge these downsides if we ever want to get rid of them.
> the TFR has gone south of 2 pretty much everywhere, with interesting exceptions (Iceland, Israel). That means that our lifestyle is incompatible with long term survival.
Only if the rate stays there permanently, which is unlikely. Over the span of a century or two, some population contraction might actually be good for overall survival.
Yeah, but a society of year 2221 is likely to look completely different from society of 2021. We do not yet know how.
It might be that Taliban-like theocracies inherit the Earth through their much higher fertility, or it might be that authoritarian countries start producing children in artificial wombs, or something completely different. But the current societal model where the old are more numerous than the young is likely to be unsustainable. It is not just raw numbers (population contraction); it is the structure of the population that is extra worrisome.
Not if you've studied much history. Modern western society is awesome compared to what nearly all of our ancestors lived through. Wanting more is good, but denigrating things that nearly anyone from history would kill for doesn't sound right.