America is running on fumes
Miscellaneous commentary.<p>1. It seems like a rather bad sign to rely too heavily on immigration. Immigrants like that come to the US because of better opportunities, so they may be selection bias here, but why aren&#x27;t those opportunities being pursued by Americans? One cause is the poor quality of education.<p>2. Unless the incentives so crushing that it is impossible to do any research that isn&#x27;t a crowd pleaser, I don&#x27;t like the idea of laying too much blame at their feet. People in the sciences have agency and they can choose to sacrifice popularity to pursue something they believe is worth exploring. I think most of them, like most people, are motivated by other often petty careerist desires (an exception would be that you&#x27;ve sort of painted yourself into a corner and need to support a family and the incentives are so brutal that you wouldn&#x27;t be able to do so otherwise). So work on virtue and a lot of the good stuff will follow. We have a dearth of virtue.<p>3. I would not emphasize &quot;new ideas&quot; primarily. It&#x27;s not about new ideas per se. It&#x27;s about deepening your own understanding of something and to share that understanding with others (though much of science is actually less about understanding and more about technology production and therefore industrial application). The language of &quot;new ideas&quot; makes it sound like what&#x27;s &quot;new&quot; and &quot;ideas&quot; are inherently valuable things just because they&#x27;re new and they&#x27;re ideas. It&#x27;s incredibly pointless to pursue these for that reason and I believe this unhealthy compulsion is what stands behind the fetish for novelty and the intellectual superficiality it can produce. Novelty qua novelty is not a worthy pursuit!<p>4. Many of the inventions listed are low hanging fruit. Coca cola? Come on, man. And this right before he accuses the smartphone of banality. Besides, the measure of a civilization is not ultimately to be found in its technical savvy, but it&#x27;s spiritual health. That health, of course, bears good fruit.<p>5. The so-called Dark Ages are accused of being a period of stagnation. But what was happening was the synthesis of a new civilization that drew into itself the good within the ashes of the old. We could witness something similar, not in any big P &quot;Progressive&quot; sense, but as a repudiation of the rot of modernity and a return to tradition. Mind you, I speak in decades, and probably centuries.<p>6. Any age that is as obsessed with orgasms as ours (and &quot;paradoxically&quot; as impotent and sterile) will not be mentally fit enough to pursue anything that requires deep, sustained intellectual engagement and commitment. Any culture that makes &quot;following your passions (appetites)&quot;, the effeminate pursuit of pleasure, and the delicate avoidance of discomfort (and the envy of those who reject this ethos) its founding doctrines is doomed to wallow in mediocrity ans spiritual slavery. Incidentally, this impotence and sterility, the result of a hedonistic view of sex, relationships, and life in general, is responsible for the demographic crisis. Raising children is work and can be exhausting and unpleasant and will certainly detract from a life of pleasure. And when you&#x27;re as demoralized as people are today, why suffer all that? Toward what end? If anything, we are simply living out the nihilism that has been with us for some time. Nietzsche wrote of it (though his &quot;remedy&quot; was of course preposterously and syphilitically insane). We are riding out the fumes of a civilization that struck a blow a long time ago. The bad motivations, the idols (to borrow Nietzsche), false gods that they are, have progressively withered as they have shown to be incapable of functioning as such. The very notion of truth itself is suspect. We now worship our appetites. We are now &quot;liberated&quot; from the truth. Of course, anyone &quot;liberated&quot; from the truth is now disconnected from reality and how can you expect anything fruitful from someone as spiritually dead as someone who has cocooned himself away from the truth?<p>7. Globalism is a force for homogenization of culture, especially pop culture. There&#x27;s no cultural exchange as a result.<p>8. The &quot;easy answers&quot; mentality atrophies depth and sustained and measured intellectual activity.<p>9. The idea that originality is stifled by knowledge is pretty stupid. Those who don&#x27;t learn tend to repeat the mistakes of those before them, and those before them, and... In philosophy, we see this all the time (modernism has echoes in presocratic ancient Greece). Every meet a freshman philosophy major? Meet one and you&#x27;ve met them all. <i>However</i>, having learned and absorbed all that knowledge is not itself good enough to lead to originality. Humility is key. Humility is a predisposition and habit to acknowledge things as they are without denial or mental jiggery-pokery. So when you don&#x27;t know something, and you haven&#x27;t any pride, you&#x27;ll naturally ask the question because you want to know the answer. That&#x27;s your originality! Want to know whence the stagnation? A populace that has no humility and one with too much pride to be honest about what they know and don&#x27;t know. I you can&#x27;t admit that the emperor is naked, how can you even think to ask &quot;why&quot;?