La Voce del Destino

Random Thoughts on Our New World Disorder

William TimbermanLeave a comment

The geopolitics of the twenty-first century are showing increasing signs of the raggedness that history suggests can persist for a very long time between one period of stability and another. People claiming to predict the future in such times tend to be either Pollyannas or doomsayers, and while their predictions may make headlines for a while, over time they tend to become background noise, the static that always accompanies the tearing apart of certainties. If wisdom is still possible for anyone living in times like ours, it will inevitably be forced to alternate between irony and silence.

That unfortunately won’t prevent anyone with a smartphone these days, including me, from having opinions. Without pretending to look to some chimerical crowd-sourced consensus to save us, what do we think we know about our present? What do we, what can we expect from our future?

Addressing the scariest stuff first, what of the threat of global warming and the hope of success from proposed technology-based responses to it? The technology to substantially reduce the burning of fossil fuels already exists, and China has demonstrated what can be achieved with a concerted effort to deploy advances in both photovoltaic and wind technology at scale. Europe, chastened by Putin’s depravities, is already relying on these technologies to wean itself off cheap Russian gas. Even an official U.S. policy of climate change denialism is unlikely to persist much beyond Donald Trump’s time in office.

What hasn’t been adequately addressed by the increased economic competitiveness of renewable energy sources, however, is the colossal release of methane from the melting of the permafrost in the upper reaches of the northern hemisphere, nor the possibility that a steady increase in human energy generation and consumption, even from renewable sources, is unsustainable. Whether CO2 in the atmosphere can be reduced or not, turning the earth into a perpetually glowing ball on a schedule which defeats the capability of natural biological selection to compensate for its effect on non-human species seems like a recipe for disaster in the long run, even if Bill McKibben’s exhortations in the present do eventually bear fruit.

Then there’s the pressure of a steadily increasing population on the production and equitable distribution of global food supplies. We’re already seeing one critical consequence in the collapse of subsistence agriculture in the Global South. This is clearly a significant contributor to the northward mass migrations that have already caused measurable increases in political instability in both Europe and the U.S.

The industrialization of agriculture, on the other hand, has been both a blessing, and more recently, a curse. The undeniable evidence in recent years of the cascade failures that can arise from the increasing intensity of our land use and our increasing deployment of inadequately researched technologies, including biotechnologies, in support of it, is more than a little concerning. The damage caused by fertilizer runoff—ecological imbalances, groundwater contamination, localized species extinctions, etc.—are among the indications that our present methods may in fact be unsustainable. So also are the profit-based preference for crop monocultures, the intensive use of environmentally questionable pesticides and herbicides, and the deployment of genetically engineered crops that can spread uncontrollably through cross-fertilization outside the boundaries of the fields they’ve been planted in. The mass die-off of pollinating insects, already well-advanced, seems a clear warning of what we may be facing if we don’t mend our ways.

And what of war, specifically of nuclear war? With the Pax Americana now brought to an abrupt and inescapable end under Donald Trump, unilateral abandonments of global trade treaties and agreements have become commonplace. The retreat to xenophobia and hard-core racial and religious bigotries in the so-called liberal democracies is now abundantly clear to anyone who’s been paying attention. The fanatical navel-gazing of fascist ideologues is on the rise everywhere we dare to look.

These are all malignancies that have their origins in fear, and derive their motive power from it as well. Once that fear becomes endemic in a society, it fosters an infatuation with and ultimately a legitimization of violence that embeds itself in every aspect of social and political interaction up to and including routine government policy choices.

Anyone familiar with the history of twentieth century conflicts and the impact of digital technology on all aspects of human interaction, is forced to confront the possibility that wars from now on will not only be cyclical, but global, and that wars conducted with the present level of military technology can lead to the falsely rational conclusion among our political leaders that genocide, symbolic or actual, is the only policy response that can adequately address the magnitude of their uncertainties. Do we really imagine that facing what they believe to be an existential crisis, the leaders of our present and future nuclear powers will voluntarily reliquish the use of weapons they’ve now had at their disposal for nearly a century?

Where will we be ten years, fifty years, a hundred years from now? Will we still be here at all? That’s the real question. As far as I can tell, there doesn’t presently seem to be a comprehensive and credible answer to that question. If there’s ever to be an answer at all, it’s very unlikely to be a single answer. It’s much more likely to consist of a lot of little answers, a collectivity of answers cobbled together by all sorts of people, not all of them of good will, all over the world.

If we succeed in overcoming our present uncertainties, and the fear they engender, without resorting to butchering one another on a grand scale once again, perhaps on a scale we can’t recover from at all, I have no idea what form that success will take. What I am certain of, however, is that no present ism or ology will prove to be of as much help as many of us think. We’ll need to be both more flexible than we are today, and more tolerant, we’ll need to invent not only new technologies, but new selves. If we can manage that, then maybe our failures to this point will one day come to be understood as steps along a road that finally led somewhere more promising than the edge of a cliff.

If Not Now, When?

William Timberman

“Somewhere I read of the freedom of assembly. Somewhere I read of the freedom of speech. Somewhere I read of the freedom of press. Somewhere I read that the greatness of America is the right to protest for right. And so just as I said, we aren’t going to let dogs or water hoses turn us around. We aren’t going to let any injunction turn us around. We are going on.”

The Arc of History

William Timberman4 Comments

Repurposed from comments on Brad DeLong’s Grasping Reality Substack

History does appear at times to have some sort of arc, although maybe not the one referred to in MLK’s very non-Marxist portrayal of history as a pilgrim’s progress. Sixty years ago I might have been hopeful that history, at least conceptually, was finally reaching some sort of apogee, but I was young then, and my knowledge of German hadn’t yet revealed to me any of the more dismal historical events that had been busily giving the lie to Enlightenment optimism as I was being born. Nowadays, given the commedia dell’arte version of the Decline of the West being cosplayed with such ferocity by the unholy fools in the White House, I’m beginning to wonder if history’s true arc isn’t some lumpier version of a sine wave. If so, maybe people serious about what is to be done ought to exchange Hegel and Marx for the Ramayana.

Optimists hope that technology’s ultimate ROI will be to help us smooth out our ups and downs as a species. Pessimists fear that there is no ROI, that technology just heightens the amplitude of the wave until it breaks, and whether it breaks at the apogee (the singularity) or perigee (annihilation by nuclear weapon exchanges or climate collapse) hardly makes a difference. They both have evidence to offer us. Me, I have doubts that the evolution of our technology aids the speed of our biological evolution much at all. Give an ape a bone, and he uses it as a club. Millennia later, give him a hypersonic nuclear-tipped missile, or an economy predicated on the burning of trillions of dollars worth of petroleum fuels, and sic transit gloria mundi. It’s like Pogo said, “we have met the enemy, and he is us.”

How Not To Be the New York Times

William Timberman

From Federico Thoman in the America-Cina Newsletter from today’s Corriere della Sera:

Ma anche dagli Stati Uniti abbiamo parecchi spunti: un’analisi su come Trump ha cambiato la retorica di un presidente americano e di come l’amministrazione abbia imposto una «censura» a termini come «cambiamento climatico» ed «emissioni» al dipartimento dell’Energia. Se, come diceva il filosofo tedesco Heidegger, «il linguaggio è la casa dell’essere», non siamo messi benissimo.

But we also have plenty of insights from the United States: an analysis of how Trump has changed the rhetoric of an American president and how the administration has imposed a “censorship” on terms like “climate change” and “emissions” at the Department of Energy. If, as the German philosopher Heidegger said, “language is the home of being,” we’re not in a good place.

There are some fine things still to read in the world, especially if you’re lucky enough not to be trapped in the prison currently being fashioned by MAGA zealots out of American English.

Memento Mori

William Timberman

Dear Sir,

You’ll be dead soon. What’ll be the use of all that power and money then?

Will it establish and preserve a legacy? I doubt it—ambitious people will come from near and far to piss on a tyrant’s legacy as well as on his grave. Pigeons will shit on his statues, and the funding he leaves behind to have them cleaned will be reinvested in bitcoin by his heirs.

Will it found a dynasty? Carefully managed, it might, but your sons are morons, and despite what you say in public, we know you find them weak and contemptible—imperfect copies of a perfect original. The less said about your daughters the better. They’re old enough now to be as uninteresting and as greedy as your current and former wives, but not as submissive, at least not to you, now you’ve married them off to potential rivals. I mean, really, what point is there in funding the rise of someone else’s dynasty?

I know Janis Joplin once told us to get it while we can, but she was talking about love, not a commodity you’ve ever had much use for, then or now. Let that be your last thought on your way out of here: when the getting was good, you were busy getting the wrong things, and now you’re out of time.

In Defense Of Indifference

William Timberman2 Comments

We’re a quarter of a century into our new millennium. The Germans are eating less sausage, the French are drinking less wine, the Russians are trying to reverse-engineer 1991, and in the United States, our self regard has been abruptly terminated by an opera buffa Mussolini with a mouth like a guppy, and a face dipped in what looks like orange finger-paint. (Mussolini was an opera buffa character himself, of course, but the Italians invented opera, and they’ll always be better at it than anyone else.)

Despite what our newly-minted neofascist pundits are screaming at us these days, it isn’t time to re-think our principles, especially not at the behest of people who openly despise both thinking and principles. We already know what we need to know, namely that while we may not outlast them, our principles most definitely will. The rest is just noise.

The Trump Patrimony

William Timberman

An abused child speaks:

I wouldn’t want to be the last country that tries to negotiate a trade deal with @realDonaldTrump,” posted Eric Trump. “The first to negotiate will win—the last will absolutely lose. I have seen this movie my entire life.”

—Eric Trump, as quoted in “China Called Trump’s Bluff,” from an Atlantic article by Jonathan Chait published online in Apple News, May 12, 2025

We know this movie. It’s the one where the sons submit unconditionally to the cruelty of their father. It appears to be as popular in the Trump family today as it was two generations ago. Elsewhere it gets decidedly mixed reviews. Check out the Bible, or the Taviani Brothers’ film Padre Padrone. (Like the Bible, it’s available in a dubbed version for you Trumps, who still steadfastly refuse to acknowledge that anything of interest exists in the world except America-first assholes and their medieval prejudices.)

Yes Eric, I know you’d rather travel to exclusive game preserves in Africa to shoot large animals than read a book, so it might surprise you to learn that history is made by the sons who defy their fathers, not by those who submit to licking papa’s boots in the hope that someday they might inherit papa’s money and papa’s puissance. (That’s a French word, Eric. Look it up.)

Let me do you a favor, kid. Let me recommend another Taviani brothers’ film to you, La Notte di San Lorenzo. Pay special attention to what happens in the end to young Marmugi, the son of the local Fascist party chief who’d assumed thoughout the film that following in his father’s footsteps was his key to a bright future of domination over everyone in his village. Above all, consider how easily his actual fate could be yours.

Unbidden Bits—April 16, 2025

William Timberman

Political posts on social media often seem little more than rehearsals for what we’d like to see engraved on the tombstones of our friends and allies, if not on our own. Fair enough. No matter what form we choose to embody our resistance, la lutte continue:

The Fascist International

William Timberman2 Comments

Unthinkable thoughts? An oxymoron of a concept surely, at least it appears that way to anyone who takes the idea of personal liberty seriously. Any attempt to explain how it became the cornerstone of moral education in the West would be too complex to include in this meditation, but one critical aspect of that potential explanation is simple enough: How a child reacts the first time he catches an adult in a self-serving lie, or more properly, how the child perceives the social significance of that lie, can be far more important than most people think in determining what kind of adult that child will grow up to be.

For reasons that should be obvious to anyone who’s more than an occasional visitor to Dogtown, I’ve long considered unthinkable thoughts to be a false category, one established by tyrants for the sole purpose of controlling the allegiances of their subjects. Given that I’m a more or less direct intellectual descendent of the Enlightenment, my response to them is to quote Immanuel Kant:

Sapere aude! Habe Mut, dich deines eigenen Verstandes zu bedienen! ist also der Wahlspruch der Aufklärung.

Dare to know! Have the courage to avail yourself of your own understanding! is therefore the motto of the Enlightenment.

Unworthy thoughts, on the other hand—those that take the path of least emotional resistance, and in doing so escape into the world before being considered in the full light of all our mental faculties—are real enough. Despite what our pious god botherers demand, they are also common enough and harmless enough in a comparative sense not to be judged as sins by some chimerical Father in Heaven, or some equally chimerical Freudian superego. In fact, to the extent that such thoughts prioritize honesty over our all too common tendency to create a falsely competent persona, they can actually be a blessing.

Which is not to say that they can’t also be embarrassing. Yesterday I deleted my most recent post here—not because I found it indefensible, but because I found it irrelevant. Angry screeds against the enshittification of our public discourse, the arrogance of our billionaire know-it-alls, the ignorant viciousness of our sociopathic president and his followers, and the sorry state of our geopolitics in general are everywhere one looks these days. Adding to them can be tempting, but succumbing to that temptation can all too easily turn into one of those disabling addictions that prove nearly impossible to overcome.

Relying on a purely rhetorical social media-style carping as our sole defense against the lunatics responsible for our current political, economic, and social agonies is in some fundamental sense a fool’s errand, As far as I can see, it isn’t actually helping anyone. By most accounts the crisis we currently find ourselves in as a society is overdetermined to an unprecedented degree. How we think about it is dependent on which aspects of its driving force we believe to be most vulnerable to intervention, and what kinds of interventions we believe are within our power to organize and carry out.

The sad fact is that the current worldwide rise of fascism is itself as much the effect of a crisis as it is the cause of one. Fear is arguably at the root of what’s driving it. The pace of technologically driven social, political, and economic change, the effect on our collective consciousness of an always awake Internet—along with the equivalence of fact and fantasy, truth and lies that it engenders—are more than many people can bear without constructing a comforting narrative they hope will somehow sustain their sense of self. As far as these unfortunates are concerned, the fact that their narrative bears little if any resemblance to the truth is a feature, not a bug. The truth can be painful. An end to that pain is what they’re after.

This is fertile ground for sociopathic influencers, and we’re as up to our eyeballs in them now as we were in the 1930s. Tucker Carlson tells us it’s manly to tan one’s bollocks. Elon Musk, the latest incarnation of Oswald Spengler, declares empathy to be the true cause of the Decline of the West. Donald Trump announces a list of thoughts you may not think if you want a paycheck or any financial help from the federal treasury. Steve Bannon gets out of jail, dusts off his persona, and embarks on a tour of the world’s dictators, checking to see if they fancy him as the Johnny Appleseed of a new fascist international. (tl;dr, they don’t. Elon Musk is prettier, and hands out more money.)

Despite the sheer weirdness of all this nonsense, laughing at it seems uncomfortably like laughing at Auschwitz. What we’re facing seems to me to be something metaphorically akin to the exothermic chemical reactions high school chemistry teachers used to demonstrate by dropping a pencil eraser-sized nub of metallic sodium into a beaker of distilled water. Once such a reaction gets going, the energy it produces makes it self-sustaining. Stopping it before the reagents are completely consumed can only be accomplished by removing energy from the reaction faster than it’s being produced. Depending on the scale of the reaction in question, this can be virtually impossible to accomplish.

Metaphors admittedly have their limits, but if the history of our previous century is anything to go by, calling the rise of a 21st century fascist international an exothermic political reaction seems to fit what I see developing. The more vulnerable bourgeois democracies and their ruling economic classes in the 1930s were so terrified of a socialist international which demanded a more equitable distribution of the wealth their economies produced that they backed a fascist international instead. The irony is that despite how disastrously that turned out, they now look as though they’re preparing to do it again. I’m no Nostradamus, but if I had to assess current geopolitical probabilities, I’d say that it’s very unlikely that their choices this time are going to let us off any more easily than they did at the end of the 1930s. YMMV.