The following is a response to the post at The Line of an excerpt from the book On Decline by Andrew Potter. Unfortunately, commenting to this post was closed, as a result the following commentary was posted to another page on The Line stubstack. I provide links to both the original post by Andrew Potter and a link to the location where this comment appears at The Line.
Here is The Link link to the Potter post:
Here is the link to the location of the following commentary on Potter’s book excerpt: Commentary on the On Decline book excerpt. I include here my question about the closing of commenting on this topic.
Why is commenting closed for the Andrew Potter piece? Participating in thoughtful conversations is one of my main reasons for subscribing to The Line, to avoid the noise and nonsense of other social media platforms. So, without intending to dislocate the conversation, I will post my comment here. So what follows is in reference to Potter's idea of reason being "in decline"...
I am inclined to question the characterization of the problem: the "decline of reason" understood as our capacity for "collective action" in the face of global challenges. (Note: I have only read this excerpt, not the book.) I would suggest it is not that reason is in "decline" but that the current standard of reason, technical rationality, is overwhelmed by its own creation. Reason versus barbarism is a false dichotomy. The standard of reason which the author assumes has never existed at the scale of its currently attempted deployment.
The great empires of the past, Roman, Ottoman or British, never micro-managed its operations at full planetary scale. Furthermore, democratic collective action is very recent. Universal suffrage is still a work-in-progress around the world and a mere 20th century phenomenon in Canada. For most of human history collective action was managed by relatively small authoritarian elites. Peasants worked hoes and oxen, warriors wielded shields and swords, the scale of human planetary intervention was relatively insignificant.
The problem is techno-capitalist elites have been operating with the delusion that the earth can be driven like a car. More precisely, the propaganda of the institutions of technical rationality and global capitalism have promoted the idea that every problem is a human-manageable one. It just requires the organization of humans into the techno-rationalist institution for the collective action, which is imagined to be necessary, to occur and presto! Problem solved.
The average human brain is reasonably well-equipped to deal with short-term, small scale, linear thinking forms of problem-solving. However, planetary phenomenon like pandemics and climate change are multi-dimensional, complex longer-term systems which the average human can't even comprehend never mind intervene at the capacity required. Thus AI and Big Data. Human being will build a form of intelligence it does not have in order to deal with the planetary problems humans do not have the capacity to manage, but that techno-capitalism creates. That's the current implicit promise of institutionalized technical rationality. This is what is failing. It is not in decline, it's a launch, at a global scale, that has failed to leave the runway.
What's in decline is the momentary suspension of disbelief that gave rise to the delusion of grandeur that humans could conquer every little thing like it was a mouse in a Frankensteinian laboratory. What's in decline is the belief in the techno-capitalist project that is in fact building a society that with every passing year fewer and fewer folks have the capacity to live within and understand in a sane and healthy manner.
We need to reconcile ourselves to the truth that attunement, not domination, is our fundamental relationship to our indigenous homeland and organize ourselves accordingly. The earth is neither a test tube nor a car. This idea is not barbarism, it's enlightenment.