A Storm of Change
That world lies in ruins around us, wrecked by a storm of change. To evolve and endure, a frame of reference must enjoy an intimate relationship with the environment.
By Capital Thinking • Issue #1072 • View online
That world lies in ruins around us, wrecked by a storm of change.
To evolve and endure, a frame of reference must enjoy an intimate relationship with the environment.
If the environment is transformed and the frame of reference remains static, decadence—sociopolitical collapse—sets in.
That is our moment in history.
Truth After the Apocalypse
The relationship between truth and human action is shakier than one might suppose. Our perception of reality lacks any necessary connection to what we might wish to do in that reality.
If I’m standing in the middle of the street and see a truck bearing down on me, I’ll probably leap out of the way.
But that leap is propelled by a host of assumptions: that I want to live rather than die, for example, or that I prefer my present existence to some transcendent afterlife.
Truth can only exist within a context: a frame of reference.
And context, as author Steve Fuller has explained, determines the rules of the game. Every frame of reference empowers specific groups and disempowers the rest.
The medieval frame of reference empowered popes and bishops. The industrial age empowered experts and scientists.
As I have had occasion to observe before, the question “What is truth?” usually hinges on “Who decides?”
There’s isn’t a hard categorical boundary between knowledge and power.
In settled times, the frame of reference is clearly understood, the arbiters are known and accepted, and disputes occur on the margins, as new information gets absorbed into the established context.
Fuller calls such placid moments “conditions of truth.” The game is played within the rules, which, to the players, feel almost like natural laws.
Personal freedom is constrained by our positions on the field of play and, even among the powerful, is reduced to gamesmanship. Risk is low, but so is agency.
I am, of course, describing the world of the last century, dominated as it was by hierarchical institutions that monopolized both power and truth.
That world wasn’t really placid, but it was certain. It knew where it stood.
Once a handful of heroic figures set the system in motion after World War II, the duty to preserve and protect it seemed a self-evident good.
A priestly caste of assertive experts and elected insiders defined the orthodoxy. Political parties disagreed on technical points, never on fundamentals.
Even the Cold War, a far chancier affair than it is remembered today, required an unyielding certainty about first principles to match the secular zeal of the Marxist faithful.
That world lies in ruins around us, wrecked by a storm of change. To evolve and endure, a frame of reference must enjoy an intimate relationship with the environment.
If the environment is transformed and the frame of reference remains static, decadence—sociopolitical collapse—sets in.
That is our moment in history.
The institutions that eradicated polio and built the national highway grid are now, to use Yuval Levin’s term, “performative” platforms, where callow elite players strut their stuff. As in professional wrestling, the game is rigged; outcomes are meaningless.
As at the end of Rome, the emperor heaps titles of power on himself but can’t control the household staff.
It’s not drama but a bedroom farce, full of plot twists driven by weakness and falsehood—and the performance takes place before the eyes of an appalled and angry public. A radical uncertainty divides us from one another.
Andrey Mir estimates that in the first 5,000 years of the written word, a total of 300 million authors reached out to an audience.
Today, potentially at least, there are almost 5 billion authors on the Internet. Such an overdose of voices has sent a society governed on strict hierarchical principles into a state of toxic shock.
We presently address one another as though in a fever delirium. We no longer know who we are, who we were, or what to do with our wealth, power, and technology.
We are unsure whether to teach our kids math and science or train them to hate themselves. Truth has fractured, and the fissures run all the way down to our hearts.
This psychotic episode has nothing to do with “facts.” It’s the obliteration of a vast array of shared points of reference—a failure cascade in the structures of communication.
In the era of Covid-19, anything can go viral. Anyone can spin a private frame of reference that will spread like a mutated variant across the information sphere.
Fuller labels this situation “conditions of post-truth,” and he maintains, with some justice, that this brave new world is more competitive, democratic, and market-like than the previous status quo.
But a democratic competition between billions of frames of reference isn’t exactly a walk in the park—particularly if conducted, as it necessarily must be, in the absence of rules of the road.
