The thing you understand after reading a lot of ancient history is that civilizations weather lots of crises. But in the "later days" (EG the reign of Justinian) a civilization is barely getting over 1 crisis and draws 2-3 more, putting it into a death spiral. And there's no reason to presume that natural disasters can't strike while we're barely coping with human-led disasters.
I've made this point before, but I think everyone is really really under-appreciating the likelihood of major human suffering emerging from the spillover and overlap of multiple non-apocalyptic disaster scenarios. Like...
(a) political competency crisis;
(b) a natural disaster;
(c) widespread and deep technical debt in infrastructure makes a regular-ish power outage into a medium-term ordeal;
(d) during the emergency conditions a prion disease spreads unchecked between wildlife and livestock.
The human species has been distinguished from other lifeforms as the aesthetic hominids (homo aestheticus), combinatorial hominids (homo combinans), grammatical hominids (homo grammaticus), imitative hominids (homo imitans), questioning hominids (homo investigans), talking and even chattering hominids (homo loquens / loquax), playful hominids (homo ludens), storytelling hominids (homo narrans), picture-making hominids (homo pictor), and meaning-making hominids (homo poetica).
[some people] "think that the proposition that truth and justice are the greatest powers in the world is metaphorical. Well I, for my part, hold it to be true. No doubt truth has to have its defenders to uphold it. but truth creates its defenders and gives them strength."
CS Peirce to William James found in RB Perry's *Thought and Character of William James* II.424
One of the unforseen consequences of hyper-specialization / Taylorization is that there are fewer and fewer peers, and as such there are fewer and fewer opportunities to exercise compassion toward someone whose problems in working life resemble one's own. I think that the practice of compassion to peers is an important and under-recognized element of self-compassion and self-forgiveness.
The query "Chicago is the capital of" turns up some interesting answers:
- segregation
- Black America
- improv comedy
- unfettered aspiration
- cool
- the midwestern United States
- the Polish diaspora
I'll believe that US Americans are ready for communal lifestyles when they start making love love love songs about family bonds rather than individual romances.
Nothing is more depressing than talking to US Americans about what they imagine a return to communal life would look like. Lots of Type 1 fun and ego-syntonic ideas, IE "everybody will do things with me that aesthetically please me."
Like... go talk to people who live in actually communal societies. It's very often Type 2 and ego-dystonic, like "shuffle around in the cold rain while you and your cousin do X because your uncle says so," or "host a distant relative in your home for a long time."
Just once I'd like to see a good dramatization of Nixon. Nixon was terrorized by his father, who beat him and abused him as a child. The anxiety consumed Nixon. It became impossible for him to ever rest comfortably under any authority for the rest of his life. He felt he *had to* maneuver constantly just to escape further abuse. Thus the most terrifying moment of his life was the Checkers Speech, when he was rejected by his father AND nearly rejected by the leader of the free world.
Humanist interested in the consequences of the machine on intellectual history.