zompist wrote: ↑Sat Apr 30, 2022 6:11 pm
If you're talking about 2031, I absolutely have the same worries.
About 2301, however, this is precisely the sort of thing that's hard to predict. I'd suggest though that looking around at various other dates would give wildly different conclusions:
1780: the world is run by absolute monarchs, always has been, always will be
1910: the world is run by a small number of imperial, mercantile republics and always will be
1935: freedom and capitalism are a minority taste, and fascism and communism are taking over
1970: the world is run by social democrats, communism isn't looking good and fascism is a defeated joke
Some of these things become more predictable when you take into account the phenomenon of
backlash. E.g. in the US, Rooseveltian liberalism dominated for half a century, but was knocked down by a surprisingly resurgent conservatism. But if you think "the right always wins", look at the revolutions and world wars from 1776 to 1949.
Thing is, the world is more interconnected today than it was in those days, and if we get a truly globalized dictators' alliance, things might end up working the way that, if it looks like there might be a revolution somewhere, the alliance will sweep in and shore up the local tinpot guy.
(BTW, I'm a bit curious why you chose 1949 as the end of an era above.)
Reactionary regimes are fragile and tend to blow themselves up relatively quickly. (Which may be of little consolation to those caught in the explosion.)
I wish I could share this optimism. I don't see
any of the world's current reactionary regimes collapsing any time soon. Sure, some did over the past 20 years, but the others have learned their lessons from that.
Moose-tache wrote: ↑Sat Apr 30, 2022 7:47 pm
Raphael:
More likely our definitions of these things will change. By the Founding Father’s standards, the USA is a hellscape of despotism. Income tax and meat inspections would cause them to collapse onto their decorative couches.
Jeffersonians, yes. I'm less sure about Federalists. (Then again, the Federalists would faint over near-universal suffrage.)
But we don’t see these things as making us less free. Some of these restrictions, like hate speech laws or pollution regulations, make us more free to enjoy our lives without fear. Banning Nazis, it turns out, makes the “free marketplace of ideas” more functional for everyone. So it’s possible that our notion of what freedom looks like might not fit the future, but the people in the future might see us as naive Classical Liberals for not appreciating their vision of a free life.
You might have misunderstood me. I'm not worried that our precious bodily fluids might be destroyed because of left-wing advances. I'm worried that certain good things might disappear because of
right-wing advances. For instance, when it comes to banning Nazis, keep in mind that I'm from a country that has already banned them for my whole life, and I don't mind that. I'm more worried about the world being taken over by the kind of governments that would ban
non-nazis.
The thing about acceptance of sexual minorities is baffling. I cannot understand why you would think that, unless you are just tracking the Overton window without realizing it. In the US, we are having bitter battles over issues that would be easy conservative victories ten years ago. We’re not arguing about gay marriage anymore, because it’s a fait accompli. Anti-gay sentiment never went away, of course, and you see it bubble to the surface in various countries, including this one, from time to time. And these events look like “moving backward,” but really life is no less safe in the Netherlands, and no more hellish in Iran, than it was in the recent past.
In Russia and Hungary, things seem to be worse on that front than 20 years ago, with bans on "gay propaganda" that had previously been legal.
As for progressive ideas being hallmarks of a West in decline, this feels very “Lost Cause-y” to me. If you spend any time in non-Western countries, you’ll see their core values differ from ours about as much as they differ in their relationship with gravity. Most of the humanitarian successes in the West that we pat ourselves on the back about are post-War or later, hardly inherent features of our culture.
I didn't say that any of this stuff is an "inherent feature" or a "hallmark" of the West. See this paragraph in my post:
Raphael wrote: ↑Sat Apr 30, 2022 9:49 am
b) they aren't even really associated with "the West"
as a whole, but only with
specific factions and tendencies within "the West", and those factions and tendencies appear to be on the way out in "the West".
I do, however, have my doubts that people everywhere have the same core values. That's not even the case within the
same group of cultures, or even within different parts of the population of one culture.
Take for instance women’s suffrage in Britain. During some of the nastiest fighting in WWI, Britain gave women over 30 the right to vote. This made them the most advanced large, stable state (i.e. I’m excluding Kerensky’s provisional government and places like Latvia) to grant such rights to women. In that moment, a smarmy British person might think “We’d better win this war! If some other power takes over our role as global hegemon, it will majorly set back women’s suffrage.” But within three years every good candidate for future superpower had granted full voting rights to women. There was nothing about being German or American that prevented women’s suffrage in those places.
Let's just say that I
strongly doubt that LGBTQ+ rights will sweep the parts of the world they haven't reached yet with the same speed with which women's suffrage swept the world in the first half of the 20th century.
(And I doubt that Wilhelmine Germany would have introduced women's suffrage if it had won World War I, too.)
