I have been reading a very useful article by Paul Graham which points out in detail how "US politics is much more polarized than it used to be. Culturally we have ever less common ground. The creative class flocks to a handful of happy cities, abandoning the rest. And increasing economic inequality means the spread between rich and poor is growing too. I'd like to propose a hypothesis: that all these trends are instances of the same phenomenon. And moreover, that the cause is not some force that's pulling us apart, but rather the erosion of forces that had been pushing us together."
This is an interesting thesis. The main forces he sees as having been (1) war, which has an effect of making society cohesive and uniform (2) TV which used to ensure everybody watched the same thing and got the same message every day (3) big corporations that acted rather like armies and had similar effects. The Cold War continued the war effect after WWII.
In the 21st century, the US still tries to manufacture enemies but the effect is not the same, TV has become multi-channel and been substantially replaced by the internet where you only communicate with your own group and big corporations have been to a fair extent replaced by complex supply chains. These social and technological changes separate groups and increase inequality and there is currently no reason to think that this fragmentation is not going to go on for the foreseeable future.
He points out that the conformist society of the mid-20th century was no paradise, but the current problems are also formidable. As the "forces that had been pushing us together" collapse, there is a return to the norm of people differentiating from one another, but this is then magnified by technology. Technology multiplies the effects of economic activity and so those who are separated become further and further apart.
He offers no solutions. He suggests we need to be thinking more about how to cope with the consequences and give up imagining that the trends can be reversed any time soon. This is not an optimistic picture.
I can add, taking a more international view, that what happens in and to the USA has major consequences for everyone else. If the country that has been the keystone of innumerable international arrangements fragments, many structures that we have all lived within will tumble. We already see this happening through the actions of the current regime. The knock on effects will be massive. The geopolitical world will be a very different place in twenty years time.
Replies