TECHNOLOGICAL CHANGE
From my perspective all of these social changes are amplified or even often caused by technological change which in my own life has been enormous. Change doesn’t just affect MAGA Americans, it affects everyone living in the United States, everyone living anywhere in the world.
This huge technological change seems to me to be connected with the computer and the disruption that the computer and the Internet have caused. But it is also changes in global economics, global transportation, global movement from country to country that are part of this dramatic change. This has caused dislocation everywhere in the world. In the United States, in my Swannanoa Valley, the slow shift from northern factories to low wage southern factories and then to factories in low wage countries like China and India has been traumatic. And yet this same shift of industries has also raised living standards in formerly very poor countries. But while so far these changes have mainly affected blue collar workers there are signs that artificial intelligence is going to dislocate all kind of white collar jobs as well. Already my former occupation of college teaching is being dislocated through demographics, through decisions about which majors earn money more and through how to gather and share information in an Internet age. Libraries are shifting to being digital information centers.
It was easy for white collar liberals to ignore the terrific economic dislocation of factories closing, but now it appears that the world is turning upside down and everyone is going to be dislocated.
I think social change and technological change are intertwined. Birth control and the acceptance of abortion were technological changes that caused social change. It seems to me that a large part of what drives MAGA people is the desire to go back to the good old days before these huge changes in technology and social values changed. But they aren’t the only ones. As the world turns upside down and we all have to adapt, and then adapt again, change itself is a major threat. More and more of us, especially older people, want to hang on to the old ways and are threatened by the new ways. But you can’t put technology back in the bottle, change is going to come faster and faster, and with change there are many things that make our lives richer. I feel that my own life has been enriched by streaming music, streaming books, steaming movies and by being able to take everything that makes me feel most alive with me, by being able to live well with fewer and fewer tangible possessions along with being able to travel inexpensively. My travel carbon footprint bothers me but one of these days hydrogen fueled planes or some other form of transportation will remove that threat.
But right now the transition from the old traditional values and the old technologies is threatening to many people. My assumption is that just as social change has been enormous during may lifetime, acceptance of change has been slow with often a backlash. But I feel that slowly, slowly values will change and people’s identity will change. But the danger in my mind is that if change comes too rapidly that the backlash will lead to authoritarianism, seeming to MAGA people to be the only way to prevent the majority voting for change.
So my hope is that if we listen to each other and understand how we differ in what maintains our identity so that we willing to compromise as much as we can that we will be able to support each other in weathering this change.
When we are totally polarized, the extremes tend to be insisted on which makes the polarization between MAGA people and Progressive people to now be almost unbearable. Both MAGA people and Progressives insist on shifting to one extreme or the other. But the population of the United States is divided 50/50 or 51/49 but even if we would move to 60/40 a huge number of people will feel threatened. So it would seem to me that we have to realize that we are all in this together, in the United States, in the entire world, and we have to find a middle way that is as unthreatening as possible for as many of us as possible so that we can get along together as we deal with climate change and energy change and economic change and enormous social change and economic inequality which is polarizing the United States but also Europe and India and China.
Change is only going to speed up. We need to find ways of not letting it destroy us and, better yet, find ways to make all of our lives richer.
So that is my personal clumsy feeling along way of dealing with polarization in the United States and in the world.
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 