And I can explain it to you in one phrase I have read over and over again in the news from Hurricane Ike.
"I Trust the Seawall."
At some point, for some people in Galveston, the meteorologists warning them that there was 20-35 feet of water headed for their 17-foot seawall became the Ivory-Tower, Meteorological Elites. Indeed, those people MADE them into Ivory-Tower, Meteorological Elites, because we are who our societies define us to be.
>From the outside world of people rational and dispassionate enough to make
their predictions of the results of the hurricane on an intellectual basis,
the people who stayed on Galveston island after being warned of the
possibility of "certain death" were idiots. From the viewpoint of the people
who had seen storms come and go for more than a hundred years with the
seawall never having been breached, the empirical evidence was clear: based
on historical evidence, of which they had *intimate* knowledge (important
word, "intimate"), the probability that the seawall would be breached was
trivial.
Most of the time, socio-political life is a collaborative effort. As much argument as there may be among us, the bulk of human effort is based on a system of interdependence. The choices are generally between methods that will both work reasonably well, and the argument is just to pick the better one. But now and again, there come times when people have irreconcilable worldviews. Most of those times, those who "trust the seawall" are right, as dissatisfying as that is.
When making our false equivalencies, we generally raise up the new, the out-of-box, the idealistic and the old ways are right. The seawall will hold. But every now and again, so much evidence and so much energy has accumulated on the other side of that mental seawall, that it is not going to hold this time. Those who don't see that are simply going with a time-proven methodology.
The equivalency between city and country is a false one. The city is absolutely superior, without any question, and yet the country life lies safe behind that mental seawall along with so many other things. On country side of the wall, there is "individual economic liberty". On the city side we see it as a catastrophic storm of reckless, radical, laissez-faire capitalism. On the country side of the wall, it's "tradition". On the city side it's racism and sexism. Finally we get to the place that Jonathan Franzen described in the New Yorker so beautifully in a profile of Denny Hastert, the former Republican Speaker of the House. Hastert's rhetoric, his stories, all the narratives he used were about the middle-American, country life. But just beyond the fence of his toy farm, where he kept the props to remind himself always to trust the seawall, they were building a mall or something. If you looked one way, you saw this bucolic, country setting. If you looked the other way, you saw the sprawling expanse of capitalism America. Hastert, like so many conservative, middle-Americans - and indeed so many people on both sides of the political spectrum - just keep looking away from that fence, away from that seawall towards what is familiar and comfortable.
Thus, the person who judges that the modern is coming, no matter what anyone says or thinks, must at some point be satisfied to become an elitiist. All you can do is tell the people that the water and wind are coming. Beyond that, there's nothing to say.
-- peace,
boddi
http://financialroadtosocialism.blogspot.com/