An Empire in Decline? – Bits and pieces of the polycrisis

 

Feeding the military/industrial complex - Ben Freeman & William D. Hartung and at TomDispatch

In 2020, Lockheed Martin received $75 billion in Pentagon contracts, more than the entire budget of the State Department and the Agency for International Development combined. This year’s spending just for that company’s overpriced, underperforming F-35 combat aircraft equals the full budget of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. And as a new report from the National Priorities Project at the Institute for Policy Studies revealed recently, the average taxpayer spends $1,087 per year on weapons contractors compared to $270 for K-12 education and just $6 for renewable energy”

This is most definitely NOT “defense spending”. Massive spending on a war machine does not make Americans less vulnerable to the threats of pandemics, global warming, gun violence, deaths of despair, nuclear annihilation and runaway inequality. Its purpose is NOT to defend us from real threats. To the contrary, it makes our citizens more likely to suffer from all of these other crises.

Add to this the rising demands for ”law and order” at home (except, of course, for laws on gun control) and you get a picture of a society out of control. And, with some exceptions, both political parties seem to be united behind the military approach, both home and abroad.

 

The decline of the humanities (when we need them the most) – Nick Anderson, WAPO, May 20, 2023

The number of students nationwide seeking four-year degrees in computer and information sciences and related fields shot up 34 percent from 2017 to 2022, to about 573,000, according to the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center. The English-major head count fell 23 percent in that time, to about 113,000. History fell 12 percent, to about 77,000.

In 2010, arts and humanities majors of all kinds outnumbered the computer science total at U-Md. more than 4 to 1. Now the university counts about 2,400 students majoring in arts and humanities — a collection of disciplines that fill an entire college — and about 3,300 in computer science.

Some schools have taken radical steps. Marymount University, a Catholic institution in Northern Virginia, decided in February to phase out history and English majors, citing low enrollment and a responsibility to prepare students “for the fulfilling, in-demand careers of the future.”

Technology is where the money is. The humanities and particularly teaching is where the money isn’t. Is this the kind of society we want for our children? Are we prepping for a future where AI is in control? Where algorithms that maximize, say profits, make all the decisions for us?

They call it the humanities for a reason.

 

“Danger, Will Robinson, Danger” – Adam Roberts, The Economist, May 20, 2023

“Language is the stuff almost all human culture is made of,” writes Yuval Noah Harari, a historian and philosopher, in a recent By Invitation essay. Religion, human rights, money—these things are not inscribed in our DNA, and require language to make sense. In his essay, Mr. Harari poses the question: “What would happen once a non-human intelligence becomes better than the average human at telling stories, composing melodies, drawing images, and writing laws and scriptures?” The answer, he believes, casts a dark cloud over the future of human civilisation.

One more crisis to add to the cascading crises we face? Is language the only thing that makes us human? Can AI learn empathy, humility and love? Will this technology turn out to be even more threatening to human existence than our dependence on fossil fuels to produce the energy necessary for industrialization? What safeguards need to be put into place, or are we willing to let unbridled capitalism make the decisions about proceeding with the further development of AI, guided only by the profit motive?

 

The polycrisis of capitalism

The evidence just keeps pouring in. When empires are in decline, they become very, very dangerous. Has the American Dream or, as Thomas Jefferson called it, the Empire of Liberty, become a nightmare for us and the rest of the world? Can those of us who are coming to understand the nature of the polycrisis of capital in the twenty-first century, bend the arc of history back toward justice? Is there any other alternative? 

To paraphrase Langston Hughes, what happens to a dream run amok? Does it dry up from a warming climate? Or fester with pandemic after pandemic? Or does it explode in a nuclear holocaust?

We need to be ringing "the fire bell in the night" - every bell, everywhere, all at once!