I found a YouTube video the other day (apologies for having lost the link) where somebody was arguing that America's civilization is doomed. I've been hearing that my whole life, and I suppose people have been saying it for as long as there has been an America. They were certainly saying it before and during the Civil War. This particular argument, though, seemed to me a bit more credible than most of them. Not persuasive, but credible.
I don't mean I'm inclined to agree with this particular point. The video's producer is blaming our imminent downfall on corporate greed, if I understand him correctly. I don't think the problem is anyone's lust for money. I think the problem is lust for power. Of course, if you want power, you're going to need money, and you'll get it wherever and however you can, but nobody could have stopped Hitler's rise to power just by demonizing Weimar Germany's biggest corporations.
Another forecast we sometimes hear these days is about another civil war in the making. I worry more about that than a simple collapse of our civilization. Of course a civil war could itself destroy our nation, like the first one could have, but I see the same forces at work threatening both civil war and national destruction. They are what a fellow called Petr Beckmann referred to collectively as thuggery.
Beckmann was an electrical engineer who in 1971 published a book titled A History of Pi. In an early chapter he made the following comment on Greece's Golden Age:
The next 150 years saw the confrontation of Athens and Sparta, the thinkers against the thugs. The thugs always win, but the thinkers always outlast them.
He maintains this thinkers-vs-thugs theme throughout the book without defining either except by example. Beckmann was born and educated in Czechoslovakia, moving to the United States in 1963. A few years later he saw his homeland invaded by the Soviet Union and was not happy about it. Communists were certainly thugs in his view. So was the Medieval church, and so was the Roman empire. He remarks:
Rome was not the first state of organized gangsterdom, nor was it the last; but it was the only one that managed to bamboozle posterity into an almost universal admiration.
I'm not interested here in critiquing Beckmann's particular taxonomy, but the idea that history is the story of a protracted conflict between Good Guys and Bad Guys has a powerful appeal to all of us, not excepting us who consider ourselves intellectuals — thinkers, more or less by definition. Some of us know we shouldn't succumb to it, but there is a good reason the temptation is so hard to resist. It's our old friend tribalism, and it has served us well over evolutionary time.
In Beckmann's account, pi is just a convenient symbol of humanity's progress over the centuries, both technological and political. The thinkers, including those who studied pi, were the ones who made the progress happen, while the thugs were whoever was always trying to stop them. His point was certainly not that tyrants have always hated mathematicians, but rather that tyrants tend to feel threated by the kind of innovative thinking that makes scientific and mathematical progress possible and therefore all other progress.
We might not have to always call them thugs, but it's true that there have always been people opposed to progress, and those people like to occupy positions of political power — absolute power, whenever they can get it. Insofar as Beckmann makes a valid point, the thinkers are the kind of people who made the European Enlightenment happen, and the thugs are the folks who don't believe the Enlightenment was such a good thing.
Like most dichotomies, this one isn't real. Plenty of thinkers can be thuggish, and most thugs do think, at least on occasion. It's still a fact that some people want progress and know how to make it happen, and that some other people oppose their efforts. Steven Pinker found this out after publishing his Better Angels of Our Nature, and he discusses what he learned from that response in his followup Enlightenment Now. I'll continue this commentary in my next essay.
(This page last updated on August 21, 2019.)