This reminds me very much of the introduction to the Power Broker where Caro talks about all the ways in which political power has surreptitiously shaped New York, as he goes through the various roads, and bridges and parks that (to a naive eye) just sort of showed up and are there, forming the contours of the city and the state. But to Robert Caro, they are the results of political power--and, in fact, the political power of one unelected man.
I appreciate the sentiment and agree about the importance of both government and politics. To say you don’t like either is to say you just don’t like humanity but I get the impression from the quoted passage that the author doesn’t like humanity either. She only points to humanities’ degradation of the environment. Where is the wonderment at what humanity has built? They’re looking at it from space. Seems like I’d have a bit of wonder about a species that can provide you that perspective.
Yeah, I think this paragraph is both too haughty about humanity and too cynical. Climatic changes really do predate us, and changes in the structure of the cosmos certainly may outdate us. I also question if ‘politics’ is the right word to really blame for the impacts good and bad from human action on the globe.
Human power seems more clear on that front. Intriguing perspective though, on realizing things from another, radically different view.
Thanks for sharing the quote. I might just have to pick up the book. Regarding the primacy of politics, I would offer this excellent excerpt from VGR's brief history of the corporation, the first 500 years for a similar in spirit wide angle lens:
"The human world, like physics, can be reduced to four fundamental forces: culture, politics, war and business. That is also roughly the order of decreasing strength, increasing legibility and partial subsumption of the four forces. Here is a visualization of my mental model:
[IMAGE THAT YOU SHOULD CHECK OUT BY GOING TO THE ORIGINAL LINK]
Culture is the most mysterious, illegible and powerful force. It includes such tricky things as race, language and religion. Business, like gravity in physics, is the weakest and most legible: it can be reduced to a few basic rules and principles (comprehensible to high-school students) that govern the structure of the corporate form, and descriptive artifacts like macroeconomic indicators, microeconomic balance sheets, annual reports and stock market numbers.
But one quality makes gravity dominate at large space-time scales: gravity affects all masses and is always attractive, never repulsive. So despite its weakness, it dominates things at sufficiently large scales. I don’t want to stretch the metaphor too far, but something similar holds true of business.
On the scale of days or weeks, culture, politics and war matter a lot more in shaping our daily lives. But those forces fundamentally cancel out over longer periods. They are mostly noise, historically speaking. They don’t cause creative-destructive, unidirectional change (whether or not you think of that change as “progress” is a different matter).""
That's a beautiful depiction of the Overview Effect. Thanks for flagging! It reminds me of--and goes a step further than--the Apollo 14 astronaut Edgar Mitchell quote:
"You develop an instant global consciousness, a people orientation, an intense dissatisfaction with the state of the world, and a compulsion to do something about it. From out there on the moon, international politics look so petty. You want to grab a politician by the scruff of the neck and drag him a quarter of a million miles out and say, 'Look at that, you son of a bitch.'"
Have you thought through the consequences of taking political action to right all the wrongs the author perceives. Not just fossil fuels but also mining lithium is evil. How many human beings will survive on a planet that only uses energy from breezes? In fact I would imagine the author opposes the manufacture of concrete and steel so there won't even be wind power. You remind me of that creeping Jesus, David Attenborough, whose Population Matters believes in the elimination of billions of human beings. But he clings onto life decades after he has had more than his fair share of existence.
This reminds me very much of the introduction to the Power Broker where Caro talks about all the ways in which political power has surreptitiously shaped New York, as he goes through the various roads, and bridges and parks that (to a naive eye) just sort of showed up and are there, forming the contours of the city and the state. But to Robert Caro, they are the results of political power--and, in fact, the political power of one unelected man.
I read it as an argument for practicing detachment. To see problems from a different vantage point is powerful.
I appreciate the sentiment and agree about the importance of both government and politics. To say you don’t like either is to say you just don’t like humanity but I get the impression from the quoted passage that the author doesn’t like humanity either. She only points to humanities’ degradation of the environment. Where is the wonderment at what humanity has built? They’re looking at it from space. Seems like I’d have a bit of wonder about a species that can provide you that perspective.
Oh, it's not representative of the rest of the book then. She display a lot of wonder and love for humanity throughout.
Yeah, I think this paragraph is both too haughty about humanity and too cynical. Climatic changes really do predate us, and changes in the structure of the cosmos certainly may outdate us. I also question if ‘politics’ is the right word to really blame for the impacts good and bad from human action on the globe.
Human power seems more clear on that front. Intriguing perspective though, on realizing things from another, radically different view.
Thanks for sharing the quote. I might just have to pick up the book. Regarding the primacy of politics, I would offer this excellent excerpt from VGR's brief history of the corporation, the first 500 years for a similar in spirit wide angle lens:
"The human world, like physics, can be reduced to four fundamental forces: culture, politics, war and business. That is also roughly the order of decreasing strength, increasing legibility and partial subsumption of the four forces. Here is a visualization of my mental model:
[IMAGE THAT YOU SHOULD CHECK OUT BY GOING TO THE ORIGINAL LINK]
Culture is the most mysterious, illegible and powerful force. It includes such tricky things as race, language and religion. Business, like gravity in physics, is the weakest and most legible: it can be reduced to a few basic rules and principles (comprehensible to high-school students) that govern the structure of the corporate form, and descriptive artifacts like macroeconomic indicators, microeconomic balance sheets, annual reports and stock market numbers.
But one quality makes gravity dominate at large space-time scales: gravity affects all masses and is always attractive, never repulsive. So despite its weakness, it dominates things at sufficiently large scales. I don’t want to stretch the metaphor too far, but something similar holds true of business.
On the scale of days or weeks, culture, politics and war matter a lot more in shaping our daily lives. But those forces fundamentally cancel out over longer periods. They are mostly noise, historically speaking. They don’t cause creative-destructive, unidirectional change (whether or not you think of that change as “progress” is a different matter).""
https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2011/06/08/a-brief-history-of-the-corporation-1600-to-2100/
That's a beautiful depiction of the Overview Effect. Thanks for flagging! It reminds me of--and goes a step further than--the Apollo 14 astronaut Edgar Mitchell quote:
"You develop an instant global consciousness, a people orientation, an intense dissatisfaction with the state of the world, and a compulsion to do something about it. From out there on the moon, international politics look so petty. You want to grab a politician by the scruff of the neck and drag him a quarter of a million miles out and say, 'Look at that, you son of a bitch.'"
Have you thought through the consequences of taking political action to right all the wrongs the author perceives. Not just fossil fuels but also mining lithium is evil. How many human beings will survive on a planet that only uses energy from breezes? In fact I would imagine the author opposes the manufacture of concrete and steel so there won't even be wind power. You remind me of that creeping Jesus, David Attenborough, whose Population Matters believes in the elimination of billions of human beings. But he clings onto life decades after he has had more than his fair share of existence.
You are reading way too much into the passage. Doesn't mean any of those things.