It’s pretty rich hearing the critics say that no one listens to their critiques of society, economics or politics because the critiques strike at the heart of the power structures–patriarchy, hierarchy, capitalism, racism, fascism, imperialism, militarism, colonialism. News flash: No one listens because the critiques come with how-to details erased. Even bearing-witness is more policy relevant than critiques when the latter fail to recognize the former is the only option left.
Another critique gets my derision: “What’s the problem here—people aren’t as poor as before?” Who though can refute a sneer? asked a critic of Gibbons’ Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire.
“When is inventing the ship not also inventing the eventual shipwreck? Answer: “When sailing the ship across a variety of conditions proves to be reliable in real time, right now when it matters.”
What drives me up the wall is the emphatically and inescapably unidirectional decline being described as if there were no cultural gain from economic imperatives. Certainly, the ubiquitous “coping” implies little, if no, gain, notwithstanding how ingenious the improvisation and learning. And how could there be, when the critics’ culture comes from past legacies of empire and colonialism into a present and future that are, in every nook and cranny, capitalist–or worse imperialist–through and through, again and again.
Are others struck by the incongruity between a present narrativized by one group as all but a modern Plague of Cyprian (bringing virtually everything to an end as in the Roman Empire before) and the demand by many in the same group to dismantle narratives, demystify myths, and dispel imaginaries all in the name of that being a Good Thing, a manufactured realism as empyrean cosmopolitanism?
WHEN COMPLEX IS AS SIMPLE AS IT GETS 