There's this universal shorthand that epic adventure movies use to tell the good guys from the bad. The good guys are simple folk from the countryside … while the bad guys are decadent assholes who live in the city and wear stupid clothes. In Star Wars, Luke is a farm boy …while the bad guys live in a shiny space station. In Braveheart, the main character (Dennis Braveheart) is a simple farmer … and the dastardly Prince Shithead lives in a luxurious castle and wears fancy, foppish clothes. The theme expresses itself in several ways — primitive vs. advanced, tough vs. delicate, masculine vs. feminine, poor vs. rich, pure vs. decadent, traditional vs. weird. All of it is code for rural vs. urban. That tense divide between the two doesn't exist because of these movies, obviously. These movies used it as shorthand because the divide already existed.
We country folk are programmed to hate the prissy elites. That brings us to Trump. I was born and raised in Trump country. My family are Trump people. If I hadn't moved away and gotten this ridiculous job, I'd be voting for him. I know I would. (David Wong, "How American Lost Half Its F*ing Mind")
Don't forget The Hunger Games. Maybe there's more in that movie that describes our future than we want to admit. Are cosmopolitan urbanites really on the moral side of history? It's a question worth thinking about.
American meaning narratives work with these rural/urban archetypes. People in the Rural Narrative see themselves as Outsiders who need to defend themselves from slick Insiders. Trump's status as Outsider is more important to Rurals than the real truth about him, which is that he's a classic urban snake-oil salesman.
That's why many decent Americans can vote for Trump and his surrogates, i.e., deeply indecent people like DeSantis, Kemp, and Cruz, when truly inspiring, decent people oppose them. For Urban Cosmopolitans, DeSantis, Kemp, and Cruz are the real Prince Shitheads, and Gillum, Abrams, and O"Rourke are the true Bravehearts. But is it that unambiguously true?
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Those who live in the Rural Traditionalist narrative are not able to frame for themselves a life that has real future possibility, so they fetishize the past, a past they mostly misinterpret and don't understand, but that they nevertheless intuit as a source of value that Urban Cosmopolitans don't value. For those in the Urban Cosmopolitan narrative, the past has always been a burden–it's all about patriarchy, racism, homophobia, superstition, slavery and torture. There's little of value there, and so value comes only from moving toward a positive future, a future defined as unconstrained by the past. That plays out in a meaningful way for most Urban Cosmopolitans in their pursuit of careers in techno-capitalism, carreers not open to most of those living in the Rural Traditionalist Narrative because STEM is just not their thing; it's just not honored in that world. It's always been held in suspicion because of the ways in which it tends to de-legitimize traditional values and practices. Darwin and climate change don't fit in the Rural Narrative, so they are just filtered out.
And so since Urban Cosmopolitan success depends on uncritically going with the creative/destructive historical flow that is techno-capitalism, they see no problem with allowing techno-capitalism free rein, and a Libertarian market ideology has become an essential feature that justifies their acquiescence. In other words, the people who feel comfortable within the Urban Cosmopolitan Narrative are also comfortable, or at least uncritical of, a future that will be determined by the random, materialist, often cruel, greedy, and always meaningless forces that shape markets. That's ok, because Urban Cosmopolitans are on the cutting edge of evolution, to quote Gordon Gecko:
Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit. Greed, in all of its forms: greed for life, for money, for love, for knowledge, has marked the upward surge of mankind.
Gordon Gecko is everybody's definition of Prince Shithead, right? Nevertheless, there's a kind of uplifting meaning that some people take in this peroration on greed, especially the people who are shaping the human future in Silicon Valley. And Urban Cosmopolitans, especially the types who rise to positions of influence in either major party, are operating more in a Geckoist narrative than the Rurals are. The only difference between the major parties lies in that the Dems want to mitigate some of the 'frictional' negative effects of Geckoism, but they are otherwise in tune with Gecko's "evolutionary" program. They benefit from it and have no obvious interest in opposing it.
This evolutionary program when given free rein destroys everything the people in the Rural Narrative hold dear. Urban Cosmopolitans don't care for reasons stated above about how constricting all that traditional baggage is. They tell the resentful winters in the Rural Narrative, too bad: adapt or die. Get off your ass and your opioids and move to the coast where all the dynamism is. Become like us. The people in the Rural narrative understandably say, "No way I'm going to become you, Prince Shithead. You will not replace us. I'll fight you, your Liberal minions, and your evil agenda to the death. Freedooooooooom."
So to right-thinking Urban Cosmopolitans this seems delusional and over the top. Understandably so. But is it possible for Urban Cosmopolitans to understand that while Rural attribution of blame is misplaced on Blacks, Muslims, Latinos, Jews, and Liberals in general, the underlying fear of being "replaced" is not. There is a kind of repressed, culture-wide dread, imo, that humanity itself will soon be replaced. This gets acted out in completely dysfunctional ways by White Nationalists, but is the underlying dread so unfounded? White Nationalism is a coping mechanism for people in a profound state of fear about being obsoletized. But is it just the loss of their traditionalist way of life that is becoming obsolete, or are they miners' canaries for a deeper fear about humanity itself becoming obsoletized?.
The markets and market capitalism are the proximate cause of Rural Traditionalist anxiety whether they realize it or not. As I've said here often before, there is no force in human history that has been more destructive of traditional ways of life than capitalism in all its different phases. But markets are more than an economic force; they are the random, destabilizing, disruptive processes of evolution at work in the human sphere. And it's an open question whether evolution–now working as technological evolution–has a need for humans in its future. Evolution might very well replace humans with machines if machines serve its purposes better. So maybe Rurals are prescient to fear evolution. Maybe evolution is Prince Shithead personified. And if so, maybe Urbans are a little more chummy with Prince Shithead and his agenda than they'd like to admit.
And so maybe Rural Traditionalists have a point, even if they're not able to articulate it very effectively. Maybe they're right to feel that Urban Cosmopolitans have become allies to Prince Shithead in ways they are blind to. The Urban Narration is aligned with current historical Reality as it is shaped by techno-capitalism, so it seems more "fact based", but is that really such a good thing? Is the Urban narrative filtering in some 'facts' while filtering out others that are essential for true human flourishing? The Rural archetype, even if crudely, retains the memory of a kind of 'natural' human being, an idea of the human that resists being replaced by the mechanomorphic whatever that technological evolution seems bent on displacing humans with.
So this is the question that few people seem interested in thinking about. I think there is so little thinking about it because most have adopted an attitude that is very passive in the face of its inevitability. Technology will develop as it has always developed, and there's nothing we can do about it. If we don't work hard to keep up with it, someone–the Chinese or Russians or whoever–will overtake us. And so it doesn't matter whether the kind of techno-trans-humanism or post-humanism that techno capitalism is driving us toward is what we really want. It's coming, and there's nothing we can do about it but adapt. And that's what Cosmopolitan Liberals excel at–adapting–even if what they are adapting to is fundamentally dehumanizing. Does any sane person think that the mentality that governs the ethos of Silicon Valley is leading humanity into a deeper, richer, more deeply spiritual and emotionally nuanced experience of being human?
So maybe somebody ought to push back against all this inevitability. Maybe humans should not submit to being the tail wagged by technological evolution's dog. But who could possibly possibly develop such a program that would have broad legitimacy to do it? The religious traditions? Yes and No. I think the resources are there to push back, but it's not at all clear that humans will find a way to draw on them that can make a difference. Certainly the institutional manifestations of these traditions are beyond useless.
So all this is pretty dismaying. But such a program, no matter what it's source of inspiration, must link our imagination of the future of humanity to what the ancestors have told us it means to be human. It's not a question of rejecting evolution, but of taking control of it. And that requires developing a philosophy of history, a deep humanistic narrative, that imagines a rich, a humanistic future rather than a soulless, mechanomorphic one.
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