[Ibon]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('KaiserJeep', '
')
We are approaching that level of density in many human cities. Meanwhile, the incidence of extreme and violent behavior is on the rise. The reporting of such events is also on the rise. The two factors acting together mean the increase is exponential, not arithmatic. Any that succumb in the early stages are properly described as whack jobs - and they are not curable, they need to be put down.

The Internet didn't cause any of it.

[KaiserJeep]

Hate speech is hate speech, and it can be MSM, print media, verbal, or digital media. The internet does not cause it, does not exacerbate it, does not make it any more extreme.

I mean, it's a cliché, but the Nazi's didn't need FaceBook or Tweets. Had they had them, they would have used them, of course. But the message is, don't confuse the media with the root cause, which is hatred, plain and simple.

As for forced "socialization", I reject it, I want nothing to do with it. I am precisely as connected to any particular group or any individual as I wish. My life, my lifestyle, my media choices. Mine - and niether you nor anybody else gets to decide how I relate to any other individual or group, and you can keep your opinion of my choices to yourself as well. I will pay you the same respect.

The internet does not dictate such choices, or reduce anybody's range of choice. Just the opposite, and aside from weak-willed individuals - and this Pittsburgh Synagogue Shooter "Robert Bowers" may be one such - there is no downside involved.

If you want to provide children with instruction in measured and considered internet usage, or even require that a person receive such training, I don't have a problem. Most people agree that driving a motor vehicle requires such training, or using a firearm.

But aberrent and violent behavior did not originate with the internet, and IMHO, the Internet itself relieves more stress than it causes. It certainly is that way with me, and most people I know. The Internet is interactive, versus one-way communication. You can lurk about or open your brain and communicate, it IS up to you.

[Ibon]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('KaiserJeep', ' ') The Internet is interactive, versus one-way communication. You can lurk about or open your brain and communicate, it IS up to you.

[KaiserJeep]

You are in denial. You are denying the most significant change to human society since agriculture or fire. Not that it matters whether you deny it or not.

The difference being, this is an invention that changes humanity from a group of isolated individuals to a networked hive organism. You actually understand this, but cannot yet accept it. You obviously cannot make up your mind whether the change is good or bad.

Not that that matters either. Your approval is not required. In fact, the opinions of humanity en masse are also irrelevent. These changes are mostly complete, the full implications of such a fundamental changes are not fully understood by most. Many as with yourself are beginning to grasp the depth of change and feel uncertainty, fear, and doubt.

You will be assimilated.

[Tanada]

I believe there is an individual in denial, but on the topic of "Progress to Hive Mind" that individual is not Ibon.

[onlooker]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Tanada', 'I') believe there is an individual in denial, but on the topic of "Progress to Hive Mind" that individual is not Ibon.

[KaiserJeep]

You see, I have an engineer's viewpoint on this. Civilization, or more exactly, technology is a huge win and an incredible resource multiplier. It props up the huge population overshoot we already have.

Reflect for one moment what would happen if we lost the network. The JIT materials pipelines would not function, waste production would multiply, and agriculture, medicine, and food distribution would fall back to the 19th Century versions.

Would you even have access to a tiny subset of human knowledge? I stepped into my local library branch yesterday and realized that the card catalog of books had been gone for two decades. All the printed reference materials were more than two decades old, and NONE of it would be usable or even accessible without the electronic index.

By contrast, the sum total of human knowledge is in your hand in the form of a phone. In case it escaped your notice, even road signs do not have to be updated now. The wife and I navigated Boston last month with her phone, and that is no mean feat, as it is still at it's core a 17th century city of narrow one-way streets. Aside from noticing that Google routed us past a series of paying customer businesses, whose ads popped up as we passed, there was not a problem.

Likewise the doctor gave the wife an annoying app that nagged her to drink that disgusting brew that preps one for a colonoscopy. He was annoyed that I didn't carry a phone, he can't specify medication with more than a simple AM/PM schedule for me.

Communication today is multiply threaded, all dependant on the omnipresent network. Any of you feel spiritually constipated when you cannot visit your online places? In spite of my teasing to the contrary, you were assimilated years ago, and are completely dependant upon your network access.

Without the network, we will fall back to a few million apes grunting noises at one another. We lack the skills and knowledge to even run a country as we did a century back, before the network.

Note also that it does not matter whether you are a typical urban dweller (we recently passed the milestone whereby MORE THAN 50% of all 7.7 billion humans live in cities) or a scruffy-bearded afficianado smugly esconced in your rural Doomstead or Cloud Forest, you are just as dependant on the network as all of us. Heck, the Amish would starve without the network, even though they don't personally partake of it.

[onlooker]

That "network" CANNOT make clean water or breathable air. Nor replenish an array of resources including FF. Nor create a habitat , ecosystems or a climate suitable for Mammilian life like ours. So, you sound very much like Julian Simon, who stated something to the effect, that the ultimate and principal resource is human ingenuity and intellect. Inferring, by the way that therefore, human overpopulation was a good thing. The soundness of these arguments are flimsy at best

[KaiserJeep]

I would point out that doing ANY of those things requires 1) Intelligence and the ambition to do whatever it takes and 2) Experience doing those very things OR access to the needed information. The network provides #2, and humanity will sort itself into those that do what is necessary to survive, and those that do not do such and then die.

An example of what I am talking about is sanitary sewer systems. Have you ever designed and built such? Do you own a printed reference on how to do so? The answers I would give are NO and YES (I have a nice selection of the excellant Time-Life illustrated books on all sorts of usefull things). But as long as a network exists, everybody with network access has almost instant access to the very latest version of the information they need.

The areas where nobody bothers to act are those which will see Cholera outbreaks. Such as you see in the Third World where literacy is low and the network almost non-existent.

I don't think we are really disagreeing. But I also think you have decided to die, rather than to struggle to live. Think about that and get back to me again in a day or even two.

[Ibon]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('KaiserJeep', 'Y')ou see, I have an engineer's viewpoint on this. Civilization, or more exactly, technology is a huge win and an incredible resource multiplier. It props up the huge population overshoot we already have.

[Ibon]

Sometimes I feel sorry for all those folks who have firmly embedded a digital device between themselves and organic reality and how digital social interactions have eclipsed the richness of organic interactions. But then I also can feel gratitude that so many people get sucked down the vortex of network addiction. They actually probably consume less and leave more space for the rest of us.

When your social interactions are dominated by the network your inputs are limited to others who share this addiction with you. This creates a debilitating effect as you miss out on a whole universe of organic reality that is no longer at your disposal. Sad really.

I was however quite heartened by my recent trip up to the USA. I was hanging for several days with my millennial daughters and their friends. They have pretty much completely dumped social media and nobody has a television to be exposed to the toxic media. In their work they are of course using the network and the internet. But their social lives are focused on their organic friendships. We discussed social media and they were all mentioning the vacuous empty nature of the communication which lead them to dump facebook, reducing instagram to just communicating with friends in order to meet up etc.

The other heartening thing about hanging with them was in reference to the political division. This group is urban, diverse and certainly have progressive values. . They are in their upper 20's or young 30's. Their parents are almost all politically on the left. But now listen to what I overheard one night. They were saying how they are so embarrassed by their parents intolerance and arrogance and the tone to which they dismiss the political right. That the polarization is an embarrassment. This got me to thinking about something here at PO.com. We are made up of a group of calcified baby boomers set in our political ways. When I overheard these millennials express embarrassment over their parents partisan intolerance it got me to thinking about some of the dialogue we often have here. For example between Cog and myself. It made me realize that we are an older subset, aging baby boomers, set in our ways.

You would never find a younger millennial like my daughters group of friends wasting their time on a forum like this. They have a disdain for the politiical division and they are not participating in it.

This was heartening for me.

It is perhaps something for all of us to reflect on...... our own calcified obsolescence.

[MD]

blah blah.

but it's some good blah. voices in the wilderness though. Shouting to the wind

[MD]

what? you think maybe I've become completely cynical and jaded?
...yep

[MD]

blah blah. talk to the hand.

[KaiserJeep]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Ibon', 'S')ometimes I feel sorry for all those folks who have firmly embedded a digital device between themselves and organic reality and how digital social interactions have eclipsed the richness of organic interactions. But then I also can feel gratitude that so many people get sucked down the vortex of network addiction. They actually probably consume less and leave more space for the rest of us.

When your social interactions are dominated by the network your inputs are limited to others who share this addiction with you. This creates a debilitating effect as you miss out on a whole universe of organic reality that is no longer at your disposal. Sad really.

I was however quite heartened by my recent trip up to the USA. I was hanging for several days with my millennial daughters and their friends. They have pretty much completely dumped social media and nobody has a television to be exposed to the toxic media. In their work they are of course using the network and the internet. But their social lives are focused on their organic friendships. We discussed social media and they were all mentioning the vacuous empty nature of the communication which lead them to dump facebook, reducing instagram to just communicating with friends in order to meet up etc.

The other heartening thing about hanging with them was in reference to the political division. This group is urban, diverse and certainly have progressive values. . They are in their upper 20's or young 30's. Their parents are almost all politically on the left. But now listen to what I overheard one night. They were saying how they are so embarrassed by their parents intolerance and arrogance and the tone to which they dismiss the political right. That the polarization is an embarrassment. This got me to thinking about something here at PO.com. We are made up of a group of calcified baby boomers set in our political ways. When I overheard these millennials express embarrassment over their parents partisan intolerance it got me to thinking about some of the dialogue we often have here. For example between Cog and myself. It made me realize that we are an older subset, aging baby boomers, set in our ways.

You would never find a younger millennial like my daughters group of friends wasting their time on a forum like this. They have a disdain for the politiical division and they are not participating in it.

This was heartening for me.

It is perhaps something for all of us to reflect on...... our own calcified obsolescence.

[onlooker]

I actually agree with Kaiser on this. And yet I have fairly consistently expressed my concerns about the techno path and the hubris of playing God via technology. But, the Internet has allowed people from all over the planet to get a real sense of what is happening in other places and to hear the frustrations, concerns and grievances of people from disparate places about life on this planet.

So, yes, I have read comments of both a very negative and also very positive orientation. Hateful comments and Loving comments. We get to chose where we surf on the Net, what people we associate with and what subjects we follow. Adults have always needed to be discerning and the Internet demands the same. So, all in all, the Internet can potentially open people's minds to become less calcified or it can serve as a sounding board to validate or confirm one's already entrenched viewpoints. It is as Kaiser said entirely up to you.

[jedrider]

Millennial non-participation is probably what got Trump elected. I wish them well, though. Glad they're enjoying their lives. That alone is probably worth savoring at this point.

[KaiserJeep]

Ibon, BTW. There is a HUGE difference in being a couch potato planted in front of the video screen:

...and cable TV with a DVR and streaming on-demand services. I pick what I watch, and when, and where.

Couch potato, bad. Consumer of educational documentaries and science programs and the more in-depth news reporting of Frontline and 60 Minutes, good.

E-books are also good. I carry around a library of over 300 books, including Peak Oil tomes such as M. King Hubbert's original paper and Kunstler's The Long Emergency. As well as every favorite book and series of books.

[KaiserJeep]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Ibon', '')$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('KaiserJeep', 'Y')ou see, I have an engineer's viewpoint on this. Civilization, or more exactly, technology is a huge win and an incredible resource multiplier. It props up the huge population overshoot we already have.

[Tanada]

Another great post this week.
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Greer', 'I') promise, I didn’t time this sequence of posts so that this one would come out the morning after one of the most bitterly fought midterm elections in memory. Nor, of course, did I have advance notice of the outcome, though it wasn’t a surprise to me that the much-ballyhooed “blue wave” would flop as badly as it did. In place of the sweeping rejection of Trump’s presidency that the Democratic Party called for, the usual first-term midterm reaction that brings the minority party back into power in Congress gave the Dems only a thin majority in the House of Representatives. Meanwhile they lost badly in the Senate, where an expanded Republican majority can continue to ratify Trump’s judicial nominees and block any attempt to use the constitutional mechanism of impeachment to remove him from office.

In the weeks ahead we’ll doubtless see any number of attempted analyses of what did or didn’t happen in the midterm elections, spinning an equivocal election to support one or the other side of a savagely divided electorate. Popcorn vendors will have plenty of business as those of us not committed to either of these two contending forces watch the posturing from a comfortable distance. Back beyond the momentary passions of politics and personalities move broader forces, and it’s important to try to sense those now, as the smoke of the election clears and it becomes possible, for those who are willing, to look past the present moment and catch some glimpse of the deeper cycles of history in which elections play a transient role.

So far in this series of explorations we’ve used the insights of Oswald Spengler as our primary framework for understanding these deeper shapes of history, and I’d encourage those of you who are following along to keep Spengler’s basic concepts in mind as we proceed. This week’s post, though, will draw a little more heavily on another student of historical cycles, Spengler’s English rival Arnold Toynbee. In his massive twelve-volume work A Study of History, Toynbee took up Spengler’s comparative method and applied it with encyclopedic scope to the history of every culture on which he could assemble adequate data.

The overall theory that Toynbee derived from his study is to my mind less convincing than Spengler’s, but then he had a much larger personal stake in the question than Spengler did. Where Spengler supported himself quietly as a high school teacher and pursued his polymath’s banquet of studies in deliberate obscurity, Toynbee was a member of Britain’s governing caste, working as the managing secretary of a prestigious nonprofit with close ties to the British governments of his day, and his historical research was carried out with the support of elite groups in Britain and America. Spengler could look calmly at Britain as a fading Athens, eclipsed by a Rome he thought would most likely be located in either New York or Berlin; Toynbee backed away from so ruthless a clarity, and retreated into handwaving at exactly the point where Spengler went forward to his (so far, mostly successful) predictions.

When it came to the fine details, though, Toynbee was the more precise and thus in many places the more useful. He noted the phenomenon that Spengler called pseudomorphosis—the process by which a rising culture takes on the political, economic, religious, and social forms of an older and more prestigious culture—and took it apart, examining the whole range of encounters between civilizations in space and time. In the process, one of the things he highlighted was the role in such encounters of an intelligentsia.

That’s a Russian word originally, by the way, but it came into being—as plenty of words in many languages come into being—by taking a word from one language and slapping onto it a grammatical suffix from a different language. This is roughly the process by which an intelligentsia comes into being, too. The intelligentsia, in Toynbee’s terms, are those people who belong to one culture but who are educated in the ideas, customs, and practices of another.

That can happen because the first culture is conquered by the second, and the new overlords proceed to impose their own cultural forms on their new domain; it can also happen because the elite classes of the first culture, in order to compete in a world dominated by the second culture, adopt the second culture’s ideas and habits as far as they can. For an example of the first category, think of the native schoolteachers and minor bureaucrats recruited by European colonial empires all through the nineteenth century; for an example of the second, think of those Third World nations today that have parliamentary democracies, build skyscrapers in their capitals, and outfit their elite classes in business suits and neckties.

The intelligentsia are the foot soldiers of pseudomorphosis. They’re the ones whose task it is to take the foreign cultural forms they themselves have embraced and impose them, by persuasion or force, on other members of their society. There are inevitably sharp limits to how far they can take this process; there is always pushback, and since the intelligentsia are always a fairly small minority the pushback can’t just be brushed aside. That’s where you get the standard pattern of a colonial society, with a cosmopolitan elite class (either foreign or native), a native intelligentsia aspiring to a cosmopolitan status they will never attain, and the vast and sullen laboring classes that regard with smoldering hostility both the intelligentsia and the foreign culture it promotes.

The position of the intelligentsia, privileged as it is, has its bitter downsides. On the one hand, they are hated and despised by the members of the vast and sullen laboring classes just mentioned; on the other, they can never quite win the approval of the foreign elites whose ways they so sedulously imitate. Neither fish nor fowl nor good red meat, the intelligentsia are caught in the gap between cultures, and within the limits of the worldview that emerges in a colonial society, there’s no way out of their predicament: they never succeed either in converting the masses to the ways of the foreign culture they’ve embraced, on the one hand, or in being fully accepted by the people who belong to that foreign culture on the other.

What breaks they intelligentsia out of their predicament, rather, are precisely those things that they fear most. To begin with, there’s personal failure. It so happens that, as I noted a few months back, it’s normal for the education system of a mature society to train far more people for managerial positions than the society’s institutions can absorb. In a society of the kind we’re discussing, the numbers of the intelligentsia inevitably balloon far beyond what the job market for schoolteachers, minor bureaucrats, and other similar positions can take in. The result is an explosive far more dangerous than mere dynamite: an educated underclass that has been cast aside by the system, after its members have been trained in all the skills necessary to understand their position and organize opposition to the existing order of things.

Then there’s the second factor, which is that no dominant culture retains its dominance forever. One way or another, the high tide of political power and cultural charisma is always followed by the running of the waters back out to sea. As the dominant culture loses its ascendancy, the intelligentsia no longer has a ready market for its only stock in trade, and the pushback from the laboring classes gains in strength.

The first thing that happens then is that the educated underclass, composed of people who have been trained for the intelligentsia but failed to claw their way into the jobs for which they have been prepared, makes common cause with the laboring classes. Look at the twilight years of Europe’s Third World colonies and you’ll find that dynamic at work. What pushes things over the edge into rapid change is that members of the intelligentsia who aren’t part of the underclass, who got the good jobs and the prestigious positions under the colonial regime, notice what’s happening, weigh their options, and side with the underclass and the masses. You’ve probably heard of a man named Mohandas K. Gandhi; read the first half or so of any good biography of him and you’ll see that dynamic written in letters ten feet tall.

This, in turn, brings us back to the theme I’ve been pursuing in recent weeks. North America and Russia are still, culturally speaking, European colonies; the elite classes in both nations ape the fashions and habits of wealthy Europeans just as sedulously as do the elite classes of so many Third World nations; the architecture of both nation’s major cities, the art forms the urban elites consume so avidly, even the clothing styles on display, are all European inventions. That’s par for the course in cultural colonies or, to put the same thing in Spengler’s terms, in societies under the influence of pseudomorphosis from a dominant culture.

It doesn’t actually make that much of a difference that political power slipped out of the hands of European elites most of a century ago, and they and their nations play second fiddle to the rulers of the really important nations. The same thing happened more than two millennia ago when Greece fell under Roman domination. Roman patricians still vied with one another to parade their knowledge of Greek culture, and decorated their villas with statues bought in Greece the way American millionaires used to snap up the European paintings that decorate art museums in Pittsburgh and Omaha today. The cultural charisma of the older society remains in place, at the level of the privileged elite and the intelligentsia that members of the elite hire and fire at will.

As I’ve never lived in Russia, and my exposure to Russian culture mostly involves literature written by dead people, I can’t state from personal experience how precisely the colonial structure of society fits what’s going on there. Here in America, on the other hand, I’ve got the advantage of lifelong residence spent in a variety of regions, and the match is exact. We’ve got our cosmopolitan elite class, wallowing in the absurd displays of extravagance common to any empire in its diminuendo phase; we’ve got our intelligentsia, caught in the usual bind, fretting at their exclusion from the classes above them, and unable to convince the classes below them to adopt the European ideas and habits that are their only stock in trade; and we’ve got the vast and sullen laboring classes who regard the intelligentsia and their ideas with the usual mix of hatred and contempt, and whose pushback against the pseudomorphosis being thrust on them has become a political fact of immense importance.

The American intelligentsia, it’s worth noting, has been caught up in a specifically European pseudomorphosis for as long as there’s been an American intelligentsia. The specific focus of their dreams has shifted over the course of its history, to be sure; from colonial days to the beginning of the twentieth century, members of the intelligentsia here aped the English; during the first two-thirds or so of the twentieth century, France was the usual focus of such obsessions—I’m thinking here among many other things of the wry offhand comment by British author Somerset Maugham, in his novel The Razor’s Edge, that France was where good Americans hoped to go when they died.

These days it’s usually the Scandinavian countries that provide the model on which members of the American intelligentsia consciously or half-consciously model their dreams of what they want the United States to become. (It’s a habit that my Scandinavian friends find baffling, for whatever that’s worth.) A few years ago a book, The Almost Nearly Perfect People: Behind the Myth of the Scandinavian Utopia by Michael Booth, tried to disabuse readers in the English-speaking world of their habit of idolizing the Nordic countries; as far as I can tell, it didn’t accomplish much, and if it had, the people at whom it was aimed would simply have found some other European country to hold up as an ideal.

In America, it’s essential to the self-concept of the intelligentsia to pretend not to be American, and to make a studied show of contempt for their own cultural and ethnic background. That’s how they prove to themselves that they don’t belong to “those people,” the ordinary Americans the intelligentsia love to despise. (I’m old enough to remember when the words “those people,” spoken by middle- and upper middle-class white people with exactly the same tone of voice and curl of lip, invariably meant people of color; the fact that it now means white working class people is a useful testimony to the way that class bigotry has supplanted racial bigotry as the prejudice du jour among our privileged classes.)

The difficulties faced by the American intelligentsia in their hopeless quest to Europeanize the United States, however, go beyond the usual factors that render such projects exercises in futility. Crucially, at the ideological core of European civilization lies the conviction that all human history is a prelude to Europe; that what Europe is now, all other societies will inevitably become; that Europe is uniquely modern, and any society that isn’t copying Europe down to the fine details is backwards and needs to catch up to the cutting edge of the future, which is (again) Europe. No doubt that’s very comforting to believe, but it doesn’t happen to be true.

The pervasive confusion that equates “European” to “modern” and consigns everything else to a notional past, is an immense barrier to understanding just now. Europe is what it is, and has the habits it has, because of the immense legacy of a couple of millennia of extremely idiosyncratic history. Wherever that history didn’t happen, the forms of European culture form a shallow veneer over a very different substrate, and show no signs of taking deeper root. It’s essential to the worldview and the self-concept of the American intelligentsia that this should not be the case, since their worlds revolve around the conviction that someday Arkansas will have the attitudes and cultural habits that Boston has today—by which time, of course, Boston will presumably be indistinguishable from a European city, or more precisely from the fantasy of what a European city ought to be that haunts the American intelligentsia’s collective imagination.

Now of course the cities of Europe, even those in Scandinavia, don’t have much in common with the fantasy just indicated. Europe is going through its own hard transition right now, driven by conflicts of a sort we also have over here—the inevitable struggle, discussed at some length by Spengler, between elitist plutocracy disguised as democracy on the one hand, and populist Caesarism backed by the masses on the other. (May I risk a spoiler? In the long run, this isn’t a struggle the plutocrats can win.) But there’s another factor, and it’s the one that we discussed last week: the pervasive link, hard to define but perilous to ignore, that binds a civilization to the broad region in which it arose.

Here in the United States, it’s not hard to catch the difference between those regions that were part of the preindustrial European world, such as the old coastal settlements of the Atlantic seaboard, and the vast hinterlands left all but untouched until Europe had finished its cultural development (in Spengler’s view, this happened around 1800). As the Eagles sang back in the day, in Providence “the old world’s shadows hang heavy in the air;” walk the streets of Providence today and you’ll taste something distinctly half-European in the ambience there. You can feel it even more strongly in old towns such as Lancaster, Pennsylvania, which were spared the ravages of twentieth-century urban renewal.

Go west into the mountains or beyond them and that vanishes utterly. What replaces it is a sense of something still raw and unformed, moving in the dark silent soil under the strip malls and subdivisions, reaching clumsily as yet toward some fulfillment whose shape has not yet become clear. That’s something that writers and poets have been sensing in the American land for a couple of centuries now. Back in the days of frontier expansion, that sense got taken (or in my view, mistaken) for an awareness of the vast potential of the European-American settlement; later, in the heyday of US empire, it got tangled up in a collective daydream that saw an Anglo-American imperium as the Universal State that would bring peace to a Europeanized world.

The frontier closed a century and a quarter ago and the temporary hegemony of the United States over most of the world is cracking around us as I write this, but I’ve felt the same thing stirring as I’ve walked various corners of the American land: the “Buffalo Wind” that Ernest Thompson Seton wrote about so movingly in his essays, the sense of a land pregnant with the future that Robinson Jeffers explored just as powerfully in his verse. I’ve never had the chance to walk along the Volga and see if something parallel stirs in the earth and the wind, offering a foretaste of another great culture on its way to manifestation—but I’d be willing to bet that it’s there.

The political convulsions we’re witnessing right now in the United States are part of the process by which the European pseudomorphosis will be shaken off. That a large part of our intelligentsia is appalled by this comes as no surprise, though I’m not sure why so many of them seem to think that a nonstop tantrum of the sort made famous by spoiled two-year-olds is a meaningful or effective response to it. (I suppose it’s mostly that acting out has become fashionable in avant-garde circles these days.) They’re going to have many more opportunities for shrieking in the years ahead, and some opportunities for celebration as well; the process we’re discussing isn’t something that will be accomplished in a few years, or even in a lifespan, but to judge by the evidence of history, it will play out in the usual fashion, in something fairly close to the usual time scale.

We live in the interval between a death and a difficult birth. We’ll talk in future posts about some of the way the rest of that interval may play out.