I’m putting together two quotes, one from a web site which I’ve been reading quite a bit, with a lot about urban planning and economic change, and another which presents the failure of this kind of change through battering realist approach, and suggests a better solution. Also a more productive path for many of us than just getting on the web to post a chart or graph (which is just a less tiring failure than the old going out in the streets to complain).
As it is, we still need to have a long discussion as to exactly what these new institutions — a gold standard, some sort of healthcare system, perhaps another sort of retirement system, a solution to the problems of Suburban Hell — should look like. We couldn’t really accomplish any of that today, because there isn’t a workable consensus on what to do. It will take another fifteen years or so of dealing with the Crisis for these ideas, which are now in their early stages, to ripen and spread.
I am mostly in the “planting seeds” business around here — seeds which will not sprout into real-world institutions until the following Spring period. Until then, they quietly germinate in the imagination. That is why I always say that you should imagine things that are different than they are today, and of course, much better. If we don’t start imagining things that are worthwhile and successful, we might start imagining something that is rather more dangerous. Adolph Hitler got the whole German people to imagine conquering all of Europe. Didn’t go so well. Be careful what you imagine. We saw earlier, for example, that people in the 1920s or 1940s imagined chemical factory food — and they got exactly what they imagined, whether they liked it or not!
In the economics sphere, people in the 1930s imagined that they could create a single institution that could solve all conceivable economic problems through the magic of funny money. They are also going to get it, good and hard, until they learn to imagine something more productive.
“Winter is here” by Nathan Lewis
http://www.newworldeconomics.c…
From Stanford’s “Entitled Opinions” radio show, which seems to have gone a bit defunct. Robert Harrison starts out describing the story of Cesare Borgia, whose history is recounted in Machiavelli’s The Prince. Cesare does everything right as a political manipulator, except to anticipate that at the point where he is about to take over and unite italy under his own power, he gets sick and almost dies. He could not plan for his own death.
This treatise was doomed from the beginning to the same sorry failure as [Cesare] Borgia’s political career. By that I mean, it’s not by chance that the unredeemed realism of The Prince has not had any direct concrete effect on political history. If its ambition was to be a handbook by which rulers could advance their own agendas, if its ambition was to instruct a prince who could one day unify Italy and throw out the foreigners, if its ambition was to found a school of political theory, or promote some kind of transformation in the history of nation states, or even if its ambition was much more modest, namely to ingratiate its author with the Medici rulers of Florence, then we have no choice but to conclude that as a political treatise, The Prince was an abortion. It failed to achieve its ends.
The abortive fate of The Prince makes you wonder why some of the great utopian texts of our traditions have had much more effect on reality itself, like the Republic of Plato for example, or Rousseau’s peculiar form of utopianism, which was so important for the French Revolution. Christianity itself, its imagination of another world, a world beyond the so-called real world, completely transformed the real politics of Europe. Or Karl Marx for that matter. It’s not the realism or scientific objectivity of the Marxian analysis, it’s not his critique of capitalism’s unsustainable systemic contradictions. It’s more Marx’s utopian projection of a future communist state which inspired socialist movements and led to political revolutions throughout the world.
What I’m trying to suggest is that realism itself is doomed to a kind of fecklessness in the world of reality, while the real power, the real virtuous power, seems to be aligned with the faculty which Machiavelli held most in contempt, namely the imagination.
It’s the human imagination which in the long run proves itself the truly efficacious and revolutionary force, even and especially when it comes to the history of nations and empires. You cannot get reality to bend to your will; you can only seduce it into transfiguration. And the fact remains that reality cannot be seduced by realism, only by what I would call “trans-realism”, if I may use a word that denotes more than fantasy, and more than utopianism, or intuitionism, or religious supernaturalism. Trans-realism here refers to something that neither resists nor escapes reality, but calls on reality to transcend itself and to turn its prose into poetry.
http://french-italian.stanford…
