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On cultures that build | new blog post
https://scholars-stage.blogspot.com/2020/06/on-cultures-that-build.html
A few months ago Marc Andreeson wrote a call for action: "It is time to build." It was a plea from Americans to take their fate in their own hands, and to look forward and build things again.
This is my response.
https://scholars-stage.blogspot.com/2020/06/on-cultures-that-build.html
A few months ago Marc Andreeson wrote a call for action: "It is time to build." It was a plea from Americans to take their fate in their own hands, and to look forward and build things again.
This is my response.
My response ranges wide--it is directly relevant, I think, to @DouthatNYT's new book on on American decadence, @patrickc's "progress studies" and the general project advanced by a great number of people--in Silicon Valley and outside it--
to once again make America a place that creates the future.
To build more, we must understand why we stopped building. My thesis goes a bit like this:
To build more, we must understand why we stopped building. My thesis goes a bit like this:
Another way to say it: "building" happens most often in a cultural environment where people have been habituated by life experience into *feeling* that the right response to any problem is to gather together a group of people and go about solving it themselves.
It was this sense of agency and this impulse to create action-oriented committees and associations that Tocqueville thought distinguished Americans from other peoples of his day.
It distinguishes us no more.
It distinguishes us no more.
One might say we live in Tocqueville's dystopia -- though worse than Tocqueville imagined, for people are not just managed into the dust by government bureaucracies, but by bureaucracies of all sorts, ones Tocqueville never imagined.
A culture that has lived three generations underneath the influence minor government functionaries, university admins, and Bob from HR is a culture of men and women who have internalized that the most effective way to solve a problem is to petition the management.
To "build" like we once did we need to work on creating a *culture* that trains people to build in the old way. Silicon Valley's existence suggests that building cultures like this are still possible.... but read the full essay here: https://scholars-stage.blogspot.com/2020/06/on-cultures-that-build.html
