Wednesday 28 April 2021

Is civilisation speeding up?

When experts that study global matters are asked 'is the world speeding up?'- they would probably say - 'it depends'. Perhaps it depends on what different disciplines suggest? But most subjects are not studied by fastness or by slowness. They are rarely defined by slower or faster. And that is part of the supposed objectiveness of all western current social-scientific analyses and now most of the similar published studies from across the rest of the world. 

This is interesting for all sorts of reasons. One major example. Technological industries, practical scientists, experimenters and the whole of the western and most of the eastern media are totally convinced there has never been so fast as the modern technical inventions. Yet, the most important fact of the world of modern technology is its creaking sluggishness - in comparison to the 20th century. The smokescreen of modern media covers the globe but smothers the reality of a decline of technology. The reducing investment in technology, obvious across the whole globe, shows the monumental shift of modern capitalism (and its economics.) Technology is slowing. 

This example is not a hiccup. As suggested, the slowness of technology is largely (but not entirely) attached to the fundamental economic system across the world. It is capitalism. Even in China their state capitalism is much larger than all of the Chinese state enterprises (and considerably larger than key US corporations.) 

Modern capitalism has had some vicious bumps in the 21st century so far. The start of the century nearly blew up huge western loans lent to the early, insolvent media would-be giants. In 2008 the banks nearly took us back to the 1930s. Covid 19, a slow and dangerous pandemic, has once more depended on super loans, the continued absence of inflation and high interests, in a global economy that now has to inflate current loans to epic and unknown proportions. This is a super bubble offering the largest pop of the capitalist system so far - with the West and the underdeveloped and medium developed countries in the front line. All of this so far in the 21 years this century has already developed a type of capitalism, global capitalism, much worse than unfolded through the 20th century - including its two World Wars. 

These reflections could go wider and deeper; in the study of the 'new' (1930s) politics - expanded across the globe; the sub-economics of wealth and the renovation of slavery, of the savage reduction of the rights of labour; and so on. But what is in-front of our eyes is enough to answer the question, is civilisation speeding up? The objectivity of the scholars alas dodge the huge crises of our works, our treatments, our actual realities. The world's civilisation is eroding. And the current efforts to sustain it, as yet, do not come anywhere close to its repair.