Long before the arrival of the delegation from Rome, Attila had probably made up his mind about further military thrusts. Epidemics in his army along with widespread famine were forcing him to break off the advance. But nobody knew it. So he willingly granted an interview to the imperial envoy, and in the course of it, he granted the bishop’s plea that the capital be spared. He even promised to withdraw from Italy, and he kept his word. The bishop of Rome had assumed a new role and staked a fresh claim on the future.
If that should occur, the future of North America and Europe may look a lot like the present of Brazil and Mexico, with nepotistic oligarchies clustered in a few swollen metropolitan areas surrounded by hinterlands that are derelict, depopulated, and despised. What Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927), with its managers in skyscrapers and its oppressed factory workers underground, was for an earlier industrial era, Neill Blomkamp’s Elysium (2013), with its sybaritic elite in orbit and its desperate earthbound slum-dwellers, might prove to be for the era that succeeds neoliberalism—a prophecy in the form of a nightmare.
Only power can check power. Only a major reassertion of the political power, economic leverage, and cultural influence of national wage-earning majorities of all races, ethnicities, and creeds can stop the degeneration of the US and other Western democracies into high-tech banana republics. To supplement conventional electoral politics, reformers will need to rebuild old institutions or build new ones that can integrate working-class citizens of all origins into decision-making in government, the economy, and the culture, so that everyone can be an insider.
Reconstructing democratic pluralism in North America and Europe to permit cross-class power sharing is a challenge as difficult as it is urgent. The alternative is grim: a future of gated communities and mobs led by demagogues at their gates.
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Fear of national defeat in war—hot war, cold war, or trade war—is more likely to compel elites to undertake reforms than fear of uprisings from below. In the twentieth century, the need to promote business-labor collaboration and cross-class harmony and to reduce racial strife in the world wars and the Cold War overcame the natural resistance of Western elites to sharing power, if only briefly, with organized labor.
If today’s technocratic neoliberalism is succeeded in the future by a new democratic pluralism, it is likely to be in the context of renewed great-power competition. In order to compete effectively with rival powers, patriotic factions within the overclass who put long-term national solidarity and national productivity above the short-term self-interest of their class may lead to the replacement of globalist neoliberalism with a new national developmentalism, combined with cross-class negotiations in the interest of social peace on the home front.
ANOTHER FALLACIOUS ARGUMENT holds that it will be necessary in the future for aging countries with low fertility rates like those of Europe and North America to import enormous numbers of immigrants to maintain the “dependency ratio”—the ratio of workers to retirees and other dependents, including children. This argument is intuitively plausible—and dead wrong.
How many immigrants would be needed to maintain today’s dependency ratio in the US indefinitely? In 2000, the UN Population Division calculated that in order to maintain the worker-to-retiree ratio in the US, the US would have to increase legal immigration from roughly 1 million a year to 12 million a year, adding more than half a billion additional net immigrants to the US population by 2050.28 Using more recent data, the Center for Immigration Studies has estimated that maintaining the US worker-to-retiree ratio would require increasing immigration fivefold, more than doubling the US population between now and 2060, to 706 million.29 Even worse, in order to maintain a fixed dependency ratio of workers to an ever-growing number of retirees, the US would need to import ever-growing numbers of immigrants until the unsustainable demographic Ponzi scheme collapsed when the rest of the world was depopulated.
"Migration can be triggered by the angle of sunlight, indicating a change in season, temperature, plant life, and food supply. Female monarchs lay eggs along the route. Every history has more than one thread, each thread a story of division. The journey takes four thousand eight hundred and thirty miles, more than the length of this country. The monarchs that fly south will not make it back north. Each departure, then, is final. Only their children return; only the future revisits the past."
e-kitap olarak okuyorum.
The Cartesian view of classical science had described the
world as an automaton, which was deterministic and capable of
total description in the form of causal laws, or "laws of nature."
Today many natural scientists would argue that the world should
be described quite differently. 9 It is a more unstable world, a
much more complex world, a world in which perturbations play
a big role, one of whose key questions is how to explain how such
complexity arises. Most natural scientists no longer believe that
the macroscopic can simply be deduced in principle from a simpler microscopic world. Many now believe that complex systems
are self-organizing, and that consequently nature can no longer
be considered to be passive.
It is not that they believe Newtonian physics to be wrong, but
that the stable, time-reversible systems which Newtonian science described represent only a special, limited segment of reality. Newtonian physics describes, for example, the motion of
the planets but not the development of the planetary system. It
describes systems at equilibrium or near to equilibrium but not
systems far from equilibrium, conditions that are at least as
frequent, if not more frequent, than systems at equilibrium.
The conditions of a system far from equilibrium are not timereversible, in which it is sufficient to know the "law" and the initial conditions in order to predict its future states. Rather, a system far from equilibrium is the expression of an "arrow of time,"
whose role is essential and constructive. In such a system, the future is uncertain and the conditions are irreversible. The laws
that we can formulate therefore enumerate only possibilities,
never certainties.
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