Navies and bases spell empires. A big army is good for beating up a geographic neighbour. Projecting power globally is about bases and carriers.

Until the UK started getting back into the game, only the US had a fleet of Nimitz and Ford class super-carriers. And the US has its global network of bases to match.

China and India are an order of magnitude behind in these terms.

The US could downsize drastically and still be a huge regional power. The real question is why would it even care about being the world policeman these days?

And the problem is also that power has shifted in ways that no-one could take its place. The thought of stepping into America’s shoes as the global cop also makes no sense if you are a China or an India.

The US experience shows that bases and carriers topple regimes but don’t build stable allies, or even reliable dictatorships. Warfare has adapted to the times and become asymmetric. Most of the world has also moved from developing to developed. Old school colonial empires can’t function anymore.

So the US certainly has the big stick military power. The flip side of this is that no one is going to rule the world - turn it into its well run colonial empire again - just by owning a big stick.

So the measures of might have changed along with the state of the world. Military power still counts. Yet forging regional communities of interest is what matters for successful statesmanship in a post-colonial, post-cold war, setting.

Is there something - anything - positive in this? — Banno

Why assume an ethical dimension?

Why assume an ethical dimension? — Voyeur

It's a practical political question for many nations when the US and China are demanding you pick a side and yet you depend on a healthy economic/security relation with both.

Is it Huawei or the highway? Is it the Uyghurs or BLM? :wink:

Ethics only comes into it as a backfill of decisions taken for other reasons - unfortunately perhaps.

apokrisis
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↪Frank Apisa Navies and bases spell empires. A big army is good for beating up a geographic neighbour. Projecting power globally is about bases and carriers.

Until the UK started getting back into the game, only the US had a fleet of Nimitz and Ford class super-carriers. And the US has its global network of bases to match.

China and India are an order of magnitude behind in these terms.

The US could downsize drastically and still be a huge regional power. The real question is why would it even care about being the world policeman these days?

And the problem is also that power has shifted in ways that no-one could take its place. The thought of stepping into America’s shoes as the global cop also makes no sense if you are a China or an India.

The US experience shows that bases and carriers topple regimes but don’t build stable allies, or even reliable dictatorships. Warfare has adapted to the times and become asymmetric. Most of the world has also moved from developing to developed. Old school colonial empires can’t function anymore.

So the US certainly has the big stick military power. The flip side of this is that no one is going to rule the world - turn it into its well run colonial empire again - just by owning a big stick.

So the measures of might have changed along with the state of the world. Military power still counts. Yet forging regional communities of interest is what matters for successful statesmanship in a post-colonial, post-cold war, setting. — apokrisis

I agree with you, but my comment, "Plus the US military remains the largest in the world" only went to the question of "largest militaries"...not the most mighty.

I might also point out that the aircraft carriers (which essentially won World War II...are almost useless in a war with nuclear weapons. Most aircraft carriers will be totally destroyed during the first hours of any major new confrontation. Planes will be only marginally involved...until we get to the point where missiles have set us back in history.

. Most aircraft carriers will be totally destroyed during the first hours of any major new confrontation — Frank Apisa

Full on nuclear war is different issue. The question here is about the global projection of power to run a world system.

And the US wouldn’t have continued to invest in supercarriers if they were as vulnerable as all that.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/lorenthompson/2019/05/21/ten-reasons-a-u-s-navy-aircraft-carrier-is-one-of-the-safest-places-to-be-in-a-war/#61fe60d82f7a

War is about logistics. And that is what the US has in place on a global basis. A network of bases and carriers that put firepower a short distance from any potential trouble spot.

There many reasons this network doesn’t function so well in the modern context. The US military is hardly a spartan operation in the field. It is still largely equiped to fight the Cold War. Etc.

But with everyone talking up China, the truth is it hardly has a navy yet. China is only now about matching Japan. China naturally wants to build up, but exists in a rather constrained environment.

The US has a base within spitting distance of every possible enemy. And none of its enemies can claim the reverse applies. That is what empire looks like.

The US through dumb leadership can misuse that investment. But it doesn’t face a serious rival for its dominance on that score.

China will be lucky to gain control over its own coastal shipping lanes. And it is the one that depends most on international trade. The US patrols all the world’s shipping lanes and needs international trade the least.

So the US starts off doubly advantaged in that particular situation. Even the gross incompetence of a Trump administration will struggle to make much of a dent in terms of US hard power.

apokrisis
4.7k
. Most aircraft carriers will be totally destroyed during the first hours of any major new confrontation
— Frank Apisa

Full on nuclear war is different issue. The question here is about the global projection of power to run a world system.

And the US wouldn’t have continued to invest in supercarriers if they were as vulnerable as all that. — apokrisis

You mean the US would not do anything stupid like leave all its battleships vulnerable to attack at Pearl Harbor???

It's a practical political question for many nations when the US and China are demanding you pick a side and yet you depend on a healthy economic/security relation with both. — apokrisis

A multi-polar world certainly seems to be an inevitability. Whether that state of affairs carries ethical consequences/connotations... that seems less clear to me.

I should have specified in terms of funding and global reach.

Marchesk
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↪Frank Apisa I should have specified in terms of funding and global reach. — Marchesk

I realized what you meant, Marchesk. And I was not being a wise-ass. It is worthwhile to mention what many people do not realize, that in pure numbers, we are not #1.

We are strong as steel when it comes to overall ability...and, as you noted, we are huge in terms of funding and global reach.

Why assume an ethical dimension? — Voyeur

I'm puzzled that you might think it doesn't. It is, after all, about what we ought do.

The US has a base within spitting distance of every possible enemy. And none of its enemies can claim the reverse applies. That is what empire looks like.

The US through dumb leadership can misuse that investment. But it doesn’t face a serious rival for its dominance on that score. — apokrisis

The stable existence or the decline of any society should not be measured just by its material resources. The decisive factor is social capital. It can be defined as the system of a particular set of informal values, norms, and beliefs shared among members of a society that permits cooperation.In the US, there has been the deepening corrosion of trust in political and social institutions. The lack of belief in what constitutes America can undermine its social capital. Similar processes had led to the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Australia is unravelling moreso. Like a tangled slinky, in fact.

Whether that state of affairs carries ethical consequences/connotations... that seems less clear to me. — Voyeur

I'm a pragmatist rather than an idealist so ethics becomes just another way of talking about an optimisation function.

Nature isn't about right and wrong. It's about systems with the balances to achieve purposes. And the ethical consequence of that is that we have our futures entirely in our own hands. We have to figure out what we actually want ... and thus who this "we" actually is. :razz:

The stable existence or the decline of any society should not be measured just by its material resources. The decisive factor is social capital. — Number2018

I completely agree in a just world with evenly distributed material resources, then social capital becomes the determining factor. The winning nations would just be those who rank high on the Human Development Index chart. All the countries that are "Scandinavian" social democracies with technocratic "evidence based" policies.

My point here is the perhaps counter-intuitive one that the US just happens to have a ridiculously unfair set of basic material advantages. Even a complete joke like Trump, and all those he surrounds himself with, can't really fuck it up. Only a Trump with actual competence might be able to achieve that.

In the US, there has been the deepening corrosion of trust in political and social institutions. The lack of belief in what constitutes America can undermine its social capital. — Number2018

Others would say that the US has never been famous for its social capital. There was just that brief moment with Roosevelt's New Deal where the 1950s became a golden age for the average working Joe. Top tax rates were approaching 90%. Unions were powerful. Social security was a thing.

And even all that was based on the US coming out of a war with a wartime manufacturing base and no war damage, an abundance of cheap domestic oil, the only big navy, Bretton Woods to make the dollar the official world currency, and a world order controlled by the US's new proxies of the UN, IMF and World Bank.

But could the US now crumble because of a few riots, a bit of woke activism, a lot of redneck moronicism? The US has always been characterised by its freely vitriolic approach to social discourse. That can indeed be a competitive national strength as much as a flaw.

Society ought to be a contest of interest groups. That is how differences eventually get settled and a society stays well adapted to the challenges and goals as it understands them. So is the current level of discord an actual problem or evidence of stuff being sorted?

The fact that it all so ugly and in your face might be a sign of something historical if it were Denmark or Singapore. But it feels more like business as usual for the US.

I don't think Trump can be explained as evidence for some real system collapse. My argument is that the system can tolerate a Trump because it is basically uncollapsable.

The US can do many dumb things. Bush and his Middle East crusades. Bush/Clinton and the various financial asset bubbles. Obama and his abject failure to achieve any sensible reforms. But it rolls on due to its inherent deep material advantages.

Most other nations actually have to make their countries work. There is an immediate cost attached to being dumb.

Similar processes had led to the collapse of the Soviet Union. — Number2018

Communism collapsed because it is brittle. It isn't a system in which interest groups can contest and sort out their differences to arrive at a mutual accomodation. It lacked a marketplace of ideas.

What actually happened was Gorbachev - in a moment of desperation - made a fateful decision to allow free speech. His hope and expectation was that this would allow some kind of graceful transition. The people would be so grateful that the Communist Party would win in open elections. The voters would ignore the economic stagnation.

But unmuzzled, the population took its opportunity. Every republic wanted to assert its own identity. The grip on the entire Eastern Bloc was lost. Gorbachev disappeared in a coup. Wall St arrived to pick at the carcass.

So the situations aren't comparable. The US is at the other end of the spectrum in terms of being plastic rather than brittle. It is designed to fly on even despite its excessive amount of in-your-face, free speech attitude. It can afford to crush jobs and lives in an economic crisis because it has all the material advantages needed to rebuild and kick on.

I am very much not an admirer of the US as a social system. But the question here is about hegemonic status. Is the US still our "leader" or has it been dethroned?

The answer is more complex in that it can't really be dethroned, but it does look like it will become far more isolationist. That leaves space for Europe and Asia to continue to evolve their regional identities along Scandinavian and Singaporean lines.

There is opportunity in that as we will have moved beyond the Cold War geopolitical contest, and even the current hegemonic debate of "If not the US, then well who?".

It is the US that frames it as us or China, which would you rather have? But that is transparent self-serving propaganda. That isn't what is really happening. It is a Trump re-election tactic built of out-of-date, failed Neocon, political thinking.

The US and China got locked into each other as two sides of the same neoliberal/dollarised system. It was a paradoxical phase of geopolitics that was a solution for a time. But the world is moving on.

The US has already forced through CUSMA as its replacement of NAFTA. The ground is laid to bring the supply chains home and become isolationist and regionally focused. The question only is about whether the US establishment can actually let go of the levers of international power. If the US has an old fossil like Biden in charge, you can see that the psychological break won't be clean.

The bigger existential challenge is whether the world has the gumption to do something about the dollar. The IMF could come out with a replacement bitcoin as the world currency. The dollar might then go into freefall, reflecting the mountain of debt the US has run up on the tab.

But the US has veto on anything the IMF does. That threat isn't credible quite yet. And even if it does happen, that just makes a fall back on an isolationist North American economy all the more sane.

If you listen to Fox and CNN, it is truly the end times for the US. But from my comfortable distance, it is an engaging soap opera.

A big shift in geopolitics has to happen. Neoliberal globalism has run its 30 year cycle. Covid rather puts a fullstop on the old. Climate change and renewables demand a proper response. Technology is on an exponential curve that will rewrite various economic fundamentals.

So a bunfight between woke activists and posturing rednecks is not the hinge-point of modern history - not anywhere near some kind of actual leadership question - even if for those involved it might feel that way.

The United States is no longer a leader among nations. — Banno

"Is" statement

Is there something - anything - positive in this? — Banno

"Ought" statement

Seems the conversation jumped an awfully large chasm in just two lines. Not saying you aren't allowed, merely asking for the underpinnings of the thought.

I'm a pragmatist rather than an idealist so ethics becomes just another way of talking about an optimisation function. — apokrisis

I (mostly) find myself in that same camp, but interestingly:

Nature isn't about right and wrong. — apokrisis

I tend to agree.

It's about systems with the balances to achieve purposes. — apokrisis

I tend to disagree.

Anyway, whether America is unraveling or not, evolution is always chaotic. Natural or Political. Whether it's good... maybe one day a historian will tell us.

whether America is unraveling or not, evolution is always chaotic. Natural or Political. — Voyeur

I take a different route. In fact a Hegelian one.

Nature is driven by an optimisation function - a thermodynamic imperative. Life and mind are then entrained to that function. Evolution isn’t chaotic at all but purposeful in its pursuit of the generic “good” of entropy production.

Human social systems arise within the same natural “ethical” economy. Life is arranged to maximise long run entropy production. Populations increase freely until reaching the Malthusian carrying capacity of their environments. Social mores then reflect what has been learnt about maintaining a stable long run balance.

Of course this natural philosophy perspective cuts across the usual favourite tropes of ethical philosophy. It doesn’t fit nicely into the is-ought distinction for a start. It doesn’t even oppose ethical idealism with ethical realism - “pragmatism” understood as just saying anything goes if it “works for you”.

So my lens here is about uncovering the secret aim at the heart of modern geopolitics and economics. In particular, the great shift that occurred with the collision of the scientific revolution and the discovery of fossil fuels.

If you track human energy consumption and its connection to political history, what you see is not chaos but a smoothly maintained exponential curve - that same story of population increase heading towards the Malthusian limits that the environment may eventually have to impose.

What becomes socially coded as ethical becomes dependent on which bit of that curve is your cultural focus. In the US, for instance, it is mostly a case of “burn baby burn”.

Shale oil is a prime example of something zero people predicted even a decade ago. It was unimaginable how the US could use its reserve currency status to suck overseas cash into its fracking adventure. Every barrel drilled is losing foreign investors money. The world is upside down.

But anyway, I am applying a very different lens here. And the point is that good and bad are social constructs used to encode thermodynamic outcomes. In the short term, growth is what is fetishised in this fossil fuel driven era of history. The US led in the sense of wiring in that exponential growth habit as a cultural fact of life. Anything standing in the way was obviously “bad”.

The long term outcomes of exponential entropy production have now come into view. What is now “good” will be whatever counts as a shift to a long-run sustainable balance within environmental limits.

The US ain’t really a leader there. But neither is any other nation.

One of the arguments for US exceptionalism is that also has all the natural advantages - unlimited capital, technology leadership, business flexibility, even the prime wind and solar resources - to most easily make the required energy transition.

It’s a bit depressing. US wins on basic advantage. Yet this means it can afford to be culturally fixated on short-termism. And in the end, it will have the most capacity to readjust to the problems it has created.

That may sound a confusing thing. But once you delve into the dynamics, it’s not chaotic. It’s a simple structural story familiar to any ecologist.

You don’t need a big brain when life is easy. You don’t need to pay attention to what can be left as a matter of general indifference.

Life is arranged to maximise long run entropy production. — apokrisis

The long term outcomes of exponential entropy production have now come into view. What is now “good” will be whatever counts as a shift to a long-run sustainable balance within environmental limits. — apokrisis

There appears to be inconsistency between these two. If life is supposed to, or ought to, maximize entropy production, then how is establishing a "long-run sustainable balance" consistent with this? If the end goal is entropy, then the quicker we get there the better. Adding "long run" to this goal, as if we ought to delay achieving the goal for as long as possible, is saying that the real goal is to slow entropy, and that contradicts the originally stated goal which is to maximize entropy..

Here's an analogy. We could say that life is arranged so as to maximize death. Billions of creatures come into existence only to die. So we say the goal of life is to die (maximize entropy). Then we notice that some cultures of living things, or particular species, trend toward long term sustenance, and this requires a sort of balance within their environment. So to maintain consistency with evolutionary theory we might claim long term "survival" is the goal. But now we have a clear contradiction between the originally stated goal, to die, and the later stated goal to live as long as possible (long-run sustainable balance).

The inconsistency, or contradiction, between the two, life is arranged to die (maximize entropy), and, the "good" is to create a balance so as to delay death (delay entropy production) for as long as possible, creates the need to assess the validity of each. One, or the other, must be wrong. I suggest that both are wrong, because to describe the "good" in such dichotomous terms is a mistake. The two are the defining extremes of life, death and survival, but living is the real activity occurring in between. The virtuous activity of living, is to seek neither of the two extremes, death nor survival, as the good, but something completely different. So you appear to be misguided, barking up the wrong tree.

could the US now crumble because of a few riots, a bit of woke activism, a lot of redneck moronicism? The US has always been characterised by its freely vitriolic approach to social discourse. That can indeed be a competitive national strength as much as a flaw.

Society ought to be a contest of interest groups. That is how differences eventually get settled and a society stays well adapted to the challenges and goals as it understands them. So is the current level of discord an actual problem or evidence of stuff being sorted? — apokrisis

It is the main point! If we answer this, it could help us to understand where is the US right now. Is there a contest of interest groups? What are the group's goals? What are the current riots about? One could say that what is on stake is not a set of particular policies reflecting different groups' interests. There are different visions of America, and this existential conflict cannot get settled in a 'regular' way.
To exist, 'system in which interest groups can contest and sort out their differences to arrive at a mutual accommodation' requires the set of fundamental and non-reflexive believes in the system's reality.

Communism collapsed because it is brittle. It isn't a system in which interest groups can contest and sort out their differences to arrive at a mutual accomodation. It lacked a marketplace of ideas. — apokrisis

What about China? This communist country has not collapsed so far.:smile:

What actually happened was Gorbachev - in a moment of desperation - made a fateful decision to allow free speech. His hope and expectation was that this would allow some kind of graceful transition. The people would be so grateful that the Communist Party would win in open elections. The voters would ignore the economic stagnation.

But unmuzzled, the population took its opportunity. Every republic wanted to assert its own identity. The grip on the entire Eastern Bloc was lost. — apokrisis

Alexei Yurchak in his book “Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More” offers a different account. He argues that during the late socialism “The reproduction of the forms of authoritative discourse became powerfully constitutive of Soviet reality but no longer necessarily described that reality; it created the possibilities and constraints for being a Soviet person but no longer described what a Soviet person was. As a result, through its ritualized reproduction and circulation, authoritative discourse enabled many new ways of life, meanings, interests, relations, pursuits, and communities to spring up everywhere within late socialism, without being able to fully describe or determine them.” Gorbachev did not merely allow free speech. Mainly, he initiated the fundamental change of the soviet discursive regime, the critical part of which was the system of beliefs in Soviet reality. When the population stopped to rely on a set of existential social presuppositions, the Soviet Union collapsed.

My argument is that the system can tolerate a Trump because it is basically uncollapsable. — apokrisis

Your argument could be understood as a piece of evidence that there is indeed a deep fundamental belief in America as an a-historical, eternal entity. What can happen if the waste majority of the population would challenge this existential value?

And the point is that good and bad are social constructs used to encode thermodynamic outcomes. — apokrisis

Even thermodynamic outcomes are probabilistic, which gives rise to the possibility of chaos. And indeed, in our journey toward higher entropy, the human race has experienced its fair share of chaos. Of course, we know that entropy rises in the long term, but it's important to remember the reason for this is an atomistic probability (a probability which allows for temporary decreases in entropy as well), and not a Hegelian Zeitgeist leading us by the hand.

On a side note, I wonder whether a multi-polar or uni-polar world is a higher entropy state of affairs? Could this be calculated?

There appears to be inconsistency between these two. — Metaphysician Undercover

You are right. But the reason is that life evolved as a long run answer because life lives within the means of the daily solar flux. Once photosynthesis had evolved, and bacteria had “poisoned” the atmosphere with sufficient oxygen, and so long as the climate generally favoured liquid water, then the conditions for life were very steady state. Ecosystems would be established that could persist within these bounds.

But fossil fuels are an entirely new game. Coal and oil are the concentrated hydrocarbons of millennia of dead swamps and ocean plankton trapped, cooked and concentrate in geological strata. There is a one time bonanza of energy to drill and burn.

So the sun rises every morning. It is a long run cycle. Hydrocarbons are a once in 100 million years single shot. The rate of usage then becomes a human choice. And we are making no choice but blindly burning them at the maximum possible rate - an exponential increase.

Of course, we have burnt about half of the readily available now. That is putting the world political system under strain. Not to mention we are stuck with the trapped waste in terms of CO2.

So the story is that life will entropify as fast as it can. Populations will grow exponentially until they hit their limits. After that, the limits force a long-run ecological way of life.

The virtuous activity of living, is to seek neither of the two extremes, death nor survival, as the good, but something completely different — Metaphysician Undercover

Yeah, no. Life is indeed about living. It is the living organism that captures high frequency sunlight and recycles it to low frequency waste heat. Dead organisms don’t do that.

It is the main point! If we answer this, it could help us to understand where is the US right now. Is there a contest of interest groups? What are the group's goals? What are the current riots about — Number2018

I agree that what is truly at stake has become hard to discern. What we are presented with in the media are two caricature extremes - woke cancel culture against meathead rednecks. And yet we know that if we met these folk in everyday real life, they would mostly be good community people. The vast gulf would suddenly seem much less real.

Many feel it is just that kind of moment in history - an interregnum - where the old order is on the way out and the new order has yet to come into focus. Globalisation, neoliberalism, US hegemony, climate denial, and the other aspects of the dominant political consensus feel like old hat. Yet a new general formula is still to be articulated. We can see its elements, but you need - in the US, on the world stage - a unifying leader and movement to crystallise things.

What about China? This communist country has not collapsed so far — Number2018

The CCP didn’t loosen its grip on public speech. And it did turn its attention to delivering economic performance under authoritarian rule. It took advantage of Western free trade as a statist enterprise.

So Russia let it all go. It got picked apart by Wall St. Putin eventually emerged to salvage what remained.

China never let go. It pivoted to the new opportunity that the end of the Cold War created. It manufactured dirt cheap goods and the US held its nose and vaguely hoped that China would become transformed into another friendly liberal democracy like Taiwan or Japan.

China is brittle. But the CCP is competent. It has had to be.

When the population stopped to rely on a set of existential social presuppositions, the Soviet Union collapsed. — Number2018

That is another way of saying what I said. Communism was bound by its belief in an internationalist proletariat revolution. The USSR and Eastern Bloc were constructs imposed on a whole variety of interest groups - ethnic minorities, religious groups, nation states, etc. Lifting the constraints releases all those suppressed forces. People could look around and aspire to something different.

Your argument could be understood as a piece of evidence that there is indeed a deep fundamental belief in America as an a-historical, eternal entity. What can happen if the waste majority of the population would challenge this existential value? — Number2018

Boiled down, my argument is that North America is eternally exceptional as a geography. It is a bonus that the US then was forged as a nation based on an advanced political theory.

The constitution is showing its age. There are all kinds of out of date beliefs like US gun laws which have been made part of US identity. The place is way too religious for a properly modern society. One could go on.

But how much scope is there for a real change in the fundamental mindset? The geographic advantage is one major thing that - even subconsciously - breeds a certain shared attitude. The shared political history likewise is simply a fact of life.

Could real change be imagined? Maybe if there is world climate collapse and the US tuned into a Mad Max survivalist situation. What kind of society would result once it is well armed gangs against federal internment camps and military rule?

But folk suddenly voting for a kinder, greener, society? The US suddenly discovering leaders under the age of 70? The US halving its military spending and investing that instead on green tech and social needs?

The chances are remote, but within the realm of possiblity. :grin:

I agree that what is truly at stake has become hard to discern. What we are presented with in the media are two caricature extremes - woke cancel culture against meathead rednecks. — apokrisis

For some observers, there is a clash of incompatible sets of values and ideas, the situation of
culture war that can involve into a real civil war. Andrew Sullivan defines woke cancel culture as " It sees America as in its essence not about freedom but oppression. It argues, in fact, that all the ideals about individual liberty, religious freedom, limited government, and the equality of all human beings were always a falsehood to cover for and justify and entrench the enslavement of human beings under the fiction of race. It wasn’t that these values competed with the poison of slavery, and eventually overcame it, in an epic, bloody civil war whose casualties were overwhelmingly white. It’s that the liberal system is itself a form of white supremacy — which is why racial inequality endures and why liberalism’s core values and institutions cannot be reformed and can only be dismantled."
Andrew Sullivan "Is There Still Room for Debate?"

Even thermodynamic outcomes are probabilistic, which gives rise to the possibility of chaos. — Voyeur

Sure. But probabilty itself is a measure of the predictable. Chaos has an equilibrium structure and isn’t actually “chaotic”. It is only our description of an equilibrium system with the least possible structure.

Of course, we know that entropy rises in the long term, but it's important to remember the reason for this is an atomistic probability (a probability which allows for temporary decreases in entropy as well), and not a Hegelian Zeitgeist leading us by the hand. — Voyeur

Entropy can only rise if there is a dissipative process to pave the way. So while you can imagine entropification as a merely atomistic and local process - the spreading of an escaped gas - in reality, the world is organised into dissipative flows. Collective phenomena like the climate, plate tectonics, ocean currents.

Life and mind arose as systems with purpose. They can actually construct entropy gradients. They can harness the available flows to extract work. So we are now a long way from any simplistic atomistic notion of entropification.

That is why I speak of it as a Hegelian project. History is driven by the entropic imperative to build the order, build the structure, that maximises dissipation.

Cosmology says this imperative rules the physical universe. Biology says it rules life. So why not expect it to continue as nature’s fundamental driver when it comes to human history?

On a side note, I wonder whether a multi-polar or uni-polar world is a higher entropy state of affairs? Could this be calculated? — Voyeur

Good point. The key measure of a dissipative system in “full flow” is that it has a scalefree or fractal structure. It’s equilbrium balance is expanding at a log/log or powerlaw rate.

So complexity science does offer an exact yardstick here. Human society ought to be scalefree in its political and economic organisation if it is indeed maximising its energy throughput and hence entropy production.

If we judge the world on economic inequality for example, the system seems to be doing pretty well. The distribution of wealth is looking powerlaw. The top 1% have almost half the total. A dozen billionaires then own most of that.

So in the current unconstrained phase of human growth - the one based on fossil fuel and engineering - we are seeing the kind of powerlaw distributions that are associated with “chaotic” systems. That tells us globalisation and neoliberalism have indeed removed any internal constraints on maximising the burn rate and sharing the proceeds around with maximal unevenness.

So it is chaotic in achieving the most with the least internal restraint. But then that is why history reduces to the Hegelian imperative of burn baby burn. The human system is nakedly defined by its most global and simple goal of entropifying a glut of hydrocarbons.

The wise long run behaviour would be to price in the cost of the environmental sink needed to dispose of the resulting waste. Plus the issue of what replaces the coal and oil as the supply peaks.

So clearly, the current political/economic system is half-arsed. The inputs are free, but the outputs have an unrecognised cost.

Getting back to your question, a unipolar world is not such a surprise given a powerlaw extreme. The world could be in a balanced equilibrium state even as it expands and grows wildly. Inequality of outcome is not a bug but a feature of “chaotic” free growth.

But a multipolar world would also seem a tamer kind of equilibrium balance - more what we would expect from a steady state dissipative system that is not growing but now globally constrained in the fashion of a mature rain forest or other long run ecosystem operating under a solar budget.

My question is still whether there is anything real being debated as opposed to a lot of suddenly frightened and anxious people dividing into interest groups by inventing the “other” which produces the necessary social solidarity.

An actual civil war needs a geography. A north-south divide that also reflects different economies - slavers vs farmers perhaps - is a good starting point.

But if the current US split is read as inner city woke vs rural redneck, then how do they actually collectivise geographically to stage their big fight to the death? The urban and the rural have less of a clear division in the US than most other places on earth.

Maybe that explains why it is largely a social media world thing. That offers a virtual stage for the battle. Cancel culture vs dumb as a rock Fox News. Irresistible force against immovable object.

It looks like something spectacular and furious is going on. Meanwhile, in real life, America trundles on.

Is anything going to come out of the work wars? Ten years ago, the complaint was how tame the youth of today seem to be. The millennials weren’t rebelling but pushing optimistic social entrepreneurship as their tech-powered neoliberal alternative. As a generation, they seemed surprisingly mild.

Now we are back to the kind of frothing hysteria of the hippies, the punks, the counter cultures. Kids have rediscovered how to annoy and scare the heck out of their elders.

But neither the quiet periods, nor the noisy periods, are the story. They are just the oscillations created by the underlying driving flow. A river snakes in wide loops across the country. But it was always tracking the same entropic gradient.

Modern history has been about removing the internal constraints on entropification. So the youth of every generation jump aboard that bandwagon of calling for ever greater freedom. And the lives that get invented as a result oddly have become only increasingly entrained to a world focused on GDP productivity.

Woke culture reflects the needs of globalisation - the project meant to continue the powerlaw expansion of fossil fuel entropification until it includes every last citizen on earth.

So work culture is no kind of long run answer - unless it’s underpinning of techno optimism is right.

Meanwhile the rural rednecks are either dumb or playing dumb. If reckless capitalism does destroy civilisation, a rural community with conservative closed ranks becomes the sensible long term bet. You can see a quiet calculation going on there.

So mostly what is going on is a social media civil war. A reaction to a moment of pending system change rather than a driver of it. You can see it is essentially meaningless as neither side presents an economic and political solution - alternatives spelt out as a rewrite of the underlying entropic imperative.

It becomes another fashion statement, like punk or hippy, if it doesn’t actually interrupt consumption as the deep locked in imperative.

For an interesting perspective, check Roger Hallam and his extinction rebellion approach to achieving actual social revolution.

One of the great secrets of politics is that the establishment is in fact far more scared and anxious about popular opinion shifting than anyone realises. It can spot real trouble.

And so woke culture is the kind of civil war that the establishment will be reassured by. It ain’t getting in the way of business. It becomes a useful distraction to avoid the difficult job of actual reform.

Once photosynthesis had evolved, and bacteria had “poisoned” the atmosphere with sufficient oxygen, and so long as the climate generally favoured liquid water, then the conditions for life were very steady state — apokrisis

Poisoned the atmosphere? I'm sure you must realize that oxygen as an interceptor of harmful UV, was necessary for the development of "higher" life forms. Why would you call this act which prepared the atmosphere for evolution to proceed, an act of poisoning the atmosphere?

Not to mention we are stuck with the trapped waste in terms of CO2. — apokrisis

A moment ago you said oxygen in the atmosphere is poison, now it's CO2 which is "waste"? What is waste, or poison, and what is a necessary condition for living, is just a matter of perspective, depending on what type of life form we're talking about.

So the story is that life will entropify as fast as it can. — apokrisis

But entropy is just an arbitrary designation, dependent entirely on one's perspective. Is O2 more entropified than CO2? What about O3? "Entropy" is completely perspective dependent.

Couple of points to expand upon.

Isn't it interesting how religion is a racket? In European history, it was a state-owned racket and even a state-owing racket. And in the US - which aimed to be modern in its separation of state and church - it became instead a free market capitalist racket. Churches literally went into business as that is what the new system wound up endorsing.

The woke vs the conservative dynamic reflects the two forms of power - the power to constrain and the power to act freely. This is a completely functional dynamic if it results in democratic self-organisation - the interest groups story of society. But not so much if one or other side of the dynamic starts to dominate.

A less religious society would be good in the sense that organised religions tend to be scriptural rather than evidence-based on their positions. But then in Europe, the state religions have become so liberal that this is hardly a thing anymore. African anglicans can't believe the wokeness of the Church of England. And in the US, any irrationalist cult can set itself up in business, even a free love one. It is actually an open market for customers. So religion is not such a factor - an imbalance to address - in that its variety is a fair reflection of society anyway.

And on the very notion of society as a democratic plurality of interest groups, that goes back to Arthur Bentley’s The Process of Government: A Study of Social Pressures, 1908.

Bentley was an interesting chap, not least because he was influenced by Dewey and hence Peircean pragmatism. He had a belated heyday in the 1950s when the US was going through its New Deal social democracy phase. And was just as quickly buried by the capitalist rebound which followed.

And on the social media dynamics of woke vs redneck culture wars, I would note the scalefree story that social media as a platform for discourse enables.

The signature of what is happening is the endless possibility for micro-grievances as the "right" response to the matchingly endless capacity for micro-aggressions.

Quick! On the internet, someone said something that was wrong! Pile on! :lol:

Social media is the new attention economy. It pays its influencers surprisingly well in hard cash, especially if there is product to be sold. And if not that, then there is at least the comforting illusion of power - the informational capacity to redirect the world's entropic flows. Which, after all, is the kind of power that money - as a store of capital - is supposed to bestow anyway.

So social media is a game. But also one evolving into an actual platform for political/economic life. It matters to the extent it becomes the place where capital - in its purest sense of the ability to co-ordinate human choice - starts to regulate the physical entropic flows upon which the anthropocene is being constructed on.

The old real world was rather linear and clunky. Social connections were deep (thus conservative) and short-ranged. The information flow coordinating a nation or a culture was restricted to a choice of a few broadcasters and the paper of whichever city you lived in.

The internet is designed instead to be exponentially scalable. And that puts it in a different equilibrium class.

The old social dynamic - the one that had to balance the complementary organising forces of competition and co-operation, differentiation and integration - could be reborn as a fractal story. Society could develop more of the macro and more of the micro.

The old middle ground - the Gaussian norm with a mean - became replaced (or "disintermediated") by the new thing of a "chaotic" distribution. That is, a powerlaw or fractal or scalefree distribution, which is defined by the fact it is a system that no longer actually has a mean, some average scale of its fluctuations or exceptions that centres everything around it.

So the point here is that thermodynamics provides us with our fundamental metaphysics - a grounding that views reality in terms of probabilistic processes. And then the modern maths of such systems - which itself is theory only about 30 years old - gives us x-ray vision to see inside nature as a Hegelian system.

We have a mathematical strength account of the two possible states of an equlibrium system - the closed or steady-state story of a Gaussian distribution versus the openly growing and scalefree story of a Powerlaw distribution.

What seems right and ethical in terms of human social structure then reflects directly which kind of statistics is more in play. Steady-state entropification or scalefree growth.

Putting this lens on history is a way of measuring what ought to be happening and not just describing what seems to be happening. It does ground the ethics that must be part of the collective social discussion as the "ethics" are granted this natural logic - the choices appropriate to two different states of being.

Again, the big question to be answered right now is what next? The human system really took off in a new direction with the Scientific Revolution and fossil fuel. There was the intellectual capital to unlock the new source of "labour". But fossil fuel is peaking. The failure to cost in an environmental sink has become a dangerous problem.

Is it game over? Or is the game about to kick on because we are in the middle of creating a society actually equipped to think in scalefree terms?

That is the spin here on woke culture (and its "other" of redneck truculence).

The current perceived problem is the micro-grievance industry being born of the new social media capacity for the unlimited recording of micro-aggressions. To anyone used to normalised social discourse - the old middle ground that built consensus - the online bickering and othering is pointless if not disastrous.

On the other hand, reflecting intellectual capital going scalefree, the online dynamic could be the new order testing its wings. The uninformed din could settle down into more structured flows. We could get back to what millennials were promoting 10 years ago - individual social entrepreneurship as the way to change the world one TED-x talk or B-corp at a time.

There is good reason this OP is about the US. With Trump and CNN, BLM and the NRA, you can easily paint it as a society in its end times. Schadenfreude is the warm fuzzy feeling that will give a lot of us too - especially having had to live so long with the US's rude noises about social democracy and the necessity of joining its neoliberal conceit.

But - to continue the story of the US's embedded advantages - it owns the tech/social media industry too. It already has its foot in that future.

And if there is a next step in terms of an end to fossil fuel entropification, a shift to greentech or even fusion power that can sustain the current thermodynamic "burn rate" with the cost of environmental sinks included, then things can move on maybe quite happily.

The promise there is that we spent 150 years getting into powerlaw entropification mode as a result of the Industrial Revolution. Now we are catching up in terms of scalefree social organisation. And that more effective organisation of the human capital side of the equation will be what releases a greentech future. The upward soaring curve of the anthropocene doesn't need to be cut short in 2050 after all.

So growing pains or death rattles. It could be either being heard stateside. But the brutal geopolitical truth is that we may be at a true planetary cross-roads, yet the US has so much accumulated advantage that it can afford to head into crisis with any old fool in charge.

The US becomes neither here nor there as a "leader" until it is again feeling the hot breath of crisis on its neck. The sleeper has to awake. Then we get to see what it is made of.

Meanwhile the real story in play is the peaking of the fossil fuel economic formula, the question of whether galloping tech is coming over the horizon to the rescue. Can we make micro-decisions about micro-energy generation and resource consumption that become the collective, emergent, macro-scale solution?

Just listen to any social entrepreneur and their search for individual solutions that can scale to be world solutions. Silicon Valley types understand non-linear dynamics. They get the scalefree equilibrium growth story. It just hasn't really reached the popular imagination I guess.

Why would you call this act which prepared the atmosphere for evolution to proceed, an act of poisoning the atmosphere? — Metaphysician Undercover

Erm. That's why I put poison in quotes. What was poison - a toxic byproduct - for primitive anaerobic life then became the basis of a photosynthetic world with a supercharged entropy production based on oxidative respiration.

Natural evolution must keep moving to greater rates of entropification if it can. And photosynthesis proved it indeed could.

A moment ago you said oxygen in the atmosphere is poison, now it's CO2 which is "waste"? — Metaphysician Undercover

Yeah. That is waste for us in the current era.

Higher CO2 is in fact good as plant fertiliser. Growth rates are increased in times of higher concentrations. But as you know, global temperature is another factor to worry about. Disrupt rainfall, kill ecosystems, and you are back to bare dirt as the Earth's primary entropification system. And bare dirt does a poor job of scattering bright sunlight into cool infrared radiation. There can be a 30 degree K difference between the same bit of ground as exposed earth vs mature ecology.

But entropy is just an arbitrary designation, dependent entirely on one's perspective. Is O2 more entropified than CO2? What about O3? "Entropy" is completely perspective dependent. — Metaphysician Undercover

You are making shit up because you don't even seem to have even a schoolboy grounding in molecular chemistry.

The first thing they teach you is why atoms form molecular arrangements that minimise their collective entropy budget. It literally explains everything.

Is there something - anything - positive in this?
— Banno

"Ought" statement — Voyeur

Well, no; that's a question, not a statement.

And the point is that good and bad are social constructs used to encode thermodynamic outcomes.
— apokrisis — Voyeur

Thanks for pointing this out. It strikes me as problematic in interesting ways.

The thought seems to be that we can rid ourselves of ethical considerations, since these will reduce to thermodynamics.

Now that runs against the is/ought barrier, obviously. The customary philosophical reply will be that since and ought cannot be got form an is, The is of thermodynamics will be unable to tell us what we ought do.

From what has been said, a reply that is open to @apokrisis is to agree that this is so, but to repeat that

Ethics only comes into it as a backfill of decisions taken for other reasons - unfortunately perhaps. — apokrisis

...and hence while it might not tell us what we ought do, it will tell us what we in fact will do, and hence that ethics is rendered irrelevant.

Which is in itself an interesting argument.

We can take the argument a step further by noticing that the theory of thermodynamics is not, at least as it stands, up to the job of telling us what we will do. No thermodynamic analysis is gong to answer the question of whether you will vote for Trump or no.

But that does not mean it could not, in principle, tell us who will win the vote.

Suppose there was a thermodynamic analysis that was able to tell us what we will in fact do. Suppose we do the calculations, and they show that we will indeed vote for Trump.

Now that we have this analysis, what is it that rules out our going against it? Can't we take that into consideration, and then vote for against Trump anyway?

One supposes that the calculation will have taken this into account, and included in its permutations the temptation for us to say that we will vote otherwise than the calculation suggests, just to spite the calculation and assert our independence.

And it will include in its permutations, that we are aware it will include this in its permutations. And so on.

Remember the supposition is that the calculation will tell us what we will indeed do, regardless of what we ought do. We find ourselves in a strange loop indeed, not unlike Popper's critique of historicism; our knowledge of the historicist principles puts us in the position of being able to supplant them

All of this to say, it is not at all clear that we could replace ethical considerations with thermodynamic calculations.