Aesthetic Materialism

    Preserve all languages.  Especially those like Bella Coola/Nuxalk, Kutenai, and Chinook Wawa, which are in danger of disappearing.  There are 238 endangered Native North American languages alone. Preserve all species of animals.  Especially the endangered animals. Preserve all species of plants.  Especially the endangered species. Preserve all fungi.  Especially the endangered species. Preserve all religions.  Especially the endangered religions. Preserve all cultures.  Especially the endangered cultures. Preserve all skills.  Especially the endangered skills. Preserve humanity in all of its dimensions, as ASI approaches. 

  How does limited government happen?  Does voting limit government?  Do strong leaders limit government?  Does law limit government?  Does protesting limit government?  Does ideology limit government? Mulling these over, and looking at the facts of history, it's not hard to come to the conclusion that nothing limits government.   It doesn't matter which party is in control. Government always grows.  Since about 4000 BCE, it has been, on average, growing and growing, never shrinking, never staying constant, growing faster and faster exponentially. (Of course, before that, humans existed happily without government for hundreds of thousands of years.  It had absolutely no need for government, just as almost all animals and plants have no need for government.  The advent of government was unnecessary, contingent, random, absurd, and irreversible.)  Yes, there have been wiggles and zig-zags in the line, but the general trend is gro...

  As I have said, no one escapes from romanticism.  I'm not sure that there is any way out of romanticism.  Romanticism is modern culture.  I don't see any means of escape. That said, there are, directionally, some paths forward that we can recognize. The first is to admit that you are a romantic.  As the 12-steppers say, first, admit that you have a problem.  Romantics tend to think that they are not romantics.  They see others as being the romantics.  "He's the romantic, not me."  So, by recognizing that you are a romantic, and taking full responsibility for that, you take a step forward.  Another is to accept that there is no escape from romanticism.  So long as you are looking for an escape, you are still a romantic.  Once you reach some kind of acceptance, this can be a kind of step forward.  Call this the Kafkaesque strategy. A third crucial strategy is related to the first two: the recognition that everyone else is...

One way of understanding romanticism:  I had a conversation with friends - one of my friends, a sort of "New Atheist" type, was expressing frustration about art, and some of my other friends are in the art world. The New Atheist type said, "I wish there were a group of objective standards by which one could judge whether art is good or bad." I can understand my New Atheist friend's frustration.  But all my other friends got very angry about this, and utterly rejected it.  (Including me!) To my mind, this shows that we are still, in some sense, romantics. That is: romanticism resists the existence of a standard by which one would judge whether something is romantic.  To me, this shows that modernism is just an extension of romanticism, and postmodernism is an extension of modernism.   We are still romantics.  Even classicism is a kind of romanticism.  (The classicist romanticizes the classical.) I'm not sure that there is any way out of romanticis...

  How does limited government happen? 

  The Netherlands may have been the region in which the bourgeoisie as a class developed its defining characteristics.  But for more than a century - the century of industrial transformation - it was the UK that pulled ahead, dominated, and became the envy of all the other capitalist powers - and was therefore the hegemon of global imperialism. By the late 19th century, however, the United States of America had grown into the world's greatest industrial power - perhaps not a surprise, since the USA had almost double the population of the UK by the turn of the century (USA was around 76 million, UK around 44 million).  But this heralded a profound shift, not only in global supply chains, but in the character of imperialism and geopolitics.  And the peripheral countries of the global capitalist system recognized this shift, and saw in it both new challenges and new opportunities.  It may have taken a global crisis in imperialism (1914-1948), but by its end, the wo...