The chief reason for his inclusion on RationalWiki is that despite his near-heroic level of dumbassery, given the choice, most people would have given anything to have him back as Vice President over George W. Bush 's VP, Dick Cheney , as stupid is better than evil , although some claim there isn't really a difference. Many were convinced that if the Republicans had won the Presidency in , America would have basically had Dan Quayle on estrogen as the VP.
He made a amazingly pitiful run for the presidency in , though the eventual GOP nominee was little better in hindsight. Nominations and campaigning for the RationalWiki Moderator Election is underway and will end on November Jump to: navigation , search. Yes, really. Here's hoping it stays that way. Hidden category: Non-stub articles needing expansion. The central question of history, Fukuyama argued, had been that of how humanity should best order itself, economically and politically, in order to ensure the best possible material, social, and spiritual state of being for everyone.
With the end of the Cold War, communism and totalitarianism, the last great challengers to capitalism and democracy by way of an answer to that question, had given up the ghost. From now on, liberal democracy would reign supreme, meaning that, while events would certainly continue, history had come to the fruition toward which it had been building through all the centuries past. In fact, he takes pains in the book to situate it within a long-established historiographical tradition, albeit updated to account for such an earth-shaking event as the end of the Cold War.
Without it, the American and French Revolutions, those two great attempts to bring concrete form to Enlightenment ideas about human rights and just government, would have been unimaginable.
During the decades prior to those revolutions, thinkers like Immanuel Kant, Baruch Spinoza, Thomas Hobbes, David Hume, and Adam Smith had articulated a new way of looking at the world, based on reason, science, humanism, and, yes, progress.
It need not resign itself to the miseries and irrationalities of the present, nor try to turn back the clock to a lost golden age.
It implies a realistic, fact-based approach to problem-solving that prefers to look forward to the future rather than back to the past. But of course, any rousing narrative of progress worth its salt needs to have a proper bang-up climax. It was the German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel in the early s who first proposed the notion of a point of fruition toward which the history of humanity was leading.
Francis Fukuyama had nothing on this guy when it came to premature declarations of mission accomplished. Hegel connected his notions of historical progress with a Greek word from classical theology: thymos. This, then, was the natural end point toward which all of history to date had been struggling.
Narratives of progress had a natural appeal during the nineteenth century, a relatively peaceful era once Napoleon had been dispensed with, and one in which real, tangible signs of progress were appearing at an unprecedented pace, in the form of new ideas and new inventions.
By the latter half of the century, almost everyone seemed to be a techno-progressive. On the contrary: it was Karl Marx among all nineteenth-century thinkers who devoted the most energy to a cherished historical eschatology. He disagreed with Hegel that liberalism — i. But even in the nineteenth century the narrative of progress had its critics.
The most vocal among them was yet another German philosopher, Wilhelm Friedrich Nietzsche. Whereas Hegel spoke of the thymos, Nietzsche preferred megalothymia: the need of the superior man to assert his superiority. To Nietzsche, nobility was found only in conflict. Maybe so, said Nietzsche — but they will still be slaves. In the face of all this, the narrative of progress seemed at best a quaint notion, at worst a cruel joke. Even when World War II ended with the good guys victorious, any sense that the narrative of progress could now be considered firmly back on track was undone by the specter of the atomic bomb.
Miller, Jr. He proposed that human civilization might progress from the hunter-gatherer phase to the point of developing nuclear weapons, and then proceed to destroy itself — again and again and again for all eternity. In , the astronomer Carl Sagan upped the ante even further in his television miniseries Cosmos. But then came that wonderful day in when the Berlin Wall came down.
What followed was the most ebullient few years of the twentieth century. The peace treaty which had concluded World War I had felt like something of a hollow sham even at the time, while the ending of World War II had been sobered by the creeping shadows of the atomic bomb and the Cold War. The only problems remaining in the world were small in comparison to the prospect of nuclear annihilation, and they could be dealt with by a united world community of democratic nations, as was demonstrated by the clean, quick, and painless First Gulf War.
Amidst all of the wars and genocides, the century had produced agents for peace like the United Nations, along with extraordinary scientific, medical, and technological progress that had made the lives of countless people better on countless fronts. Maybe the narrative of progress was as vital as ever.
Maybe it just worked in more roundabout and mysterious ways than anticipated. Maybe it was sometimes just hard to see the forest of overall progress amidst all the trees of current events. Within a few years of the fall of the Berlin Wall, an unspeakably brutal war in Bosnia and Herzegovina was showing that age-old ethnic and religious animus could still be more powerful than idealistic talk about democracy and human rights.
Well before the end of the s, it was becoming clear that Russia, rather than striding forward to join the international community of liberal democracies, was sliding backward into economic chaos and political corruption, priming the pump for a return to authoritarian rule. Odd, for such a recent, unproven theory. One hardly knows where to start with this. Or with the last mangled metaphor, which seems to be saying the opposite of what it wants to say? Was Emrich listening to too much Pink Floyd at the time?
The belief to which the game seems to subscribe, that progress in technology and hard science will inevitably drive the broader culture forward, is sometimes referred to as technnological determinism. It can be contrasted with the more metaphysical narrative of progress favored by the likes of Hegel, as it can with the social-collective narrative of progress favored by Marx.
Unsurprisingly, it tends to find its most enthusiastic fans among scientists, engineers, and science-fiction writers. Wilson, who did so together in the context of a strategy guide called Civilization: or Rome on K a Day. The game has an underlying belief in such progress. Pangloss, the best of all progressing worlds. Many an earnest progressive in the real world has doubtless wished for such an alternate universe. Galileo wished he could write about heliocentrism without being hauled before an ecclesiastical court; Einstein wished he could pursue his Theory of Relativity without contending with a pitchfork-wielding mob of Isaac Newton disciples; modern researchers wish they could explore gene therapy without people forever trying to take their stem cells away.
All of these wishes come true in Civilization , that best of all progressing worlds. Of course, even those of us who proudly call ourselves progressives need to recognize that the narrative of progress has its caveats. Notably, Civilization has no mechanisms by which advances, once acquired, can be lost again. Yet clearly this has happened in real human history, most famously during the thousand-year interregnum between the fall of the Roman Empire and the Renaissance, during the early centuries of which humanity in the West was actively regressing by countless measures; much knowledge, along with much art and literature, was lost forever during the so-called Dark Ages.
We should thus remember as we construct our narratives of progress for our own world that the data in favor of progress as an inevitability is thin on the ground indeed. We have only one history we can look back upon, making it very questionable to gather too many hard-and-fast rules therefrom.
All but the most committed Luddite would agree that progress has occurred over the last several centuries, and at an ever-increasing rate at that, but we have no form of cosmic assurance that it will continue.
There is no use in looking anywhere in earlier history for parallels to the successful inventions of the steam engine, the steamboat, the locomotive, the modern smelting of metals, the telegraph, the transoceanic cable, the introduction of electric power, dynamite and the high-explosive missile, the airplane, the electric valve, and the atomic bomb.
The inventions in metallurgy which heralded the origin of the Bronze Age are neither so concentrated in time nor so manifold as to offer a good counterexample. It is very well for the classical economist to assure us suavely that these changes are purely changes in degree, and that changes in degree do not vitiate historic parallels.
The difference between a medicinal dose of strychnine and a fatal one is also only one of degree. Nevertheless, progress at anything but the most glacial pace remains a fairly recent development that may be more of an historical anomaly than an inevitability.
Whatever else it is, the narrative of progress is also a deeply American view of history. The United States is young enough to have been born after progress in the abstract had become an idea in philosophy. Indeed, its origin story is inextricably bound up in Enlightenment idealism. That fact, combined with the fact that the United States has been fortunate enough to suffer very few major tragedies in its existence, has caused a version of the narrative of progress to become the default way of teaching American history at the pre-university level.
One could thus say that every American citizen, this one included, is indoctrinated in the narrative of progress before reaching adulthood. This indoctrination can make it difficult to even notice the existence of other views of history.
Civilization , for its part, is a deeply American game, and much about the narrative of progress must have seemed self-evident to its designers, to the point that they never even thought about it. The game has garnered plenty of criticism in academia for its Americanisms. To begin with, we might acknowledge that the narrative of progress has always been as much an ethical position, a description of the way things ought to be, as it has been a description of the way they necessarily are.
Progress will continue to be the binding theme of this series of articles, as it is the central theme of Civilization. Tags: civilization , meier , microprose , shelley. Wow, Jimmy, thanks for the look at politics and history through the lens of Civ. I really appreciate the contextualization. He got better? Acken , Oct 3, Joined: Jul 19, Messages: 1, Gender: Male.
They can remove the Dan Qualye joke only if they forfeit the Gandhi nuke meme. Lohrenswald likes this. Joined: Sep 9, Messages: If Gandhi will always be the leader of India, then Dan Quayle will always be on the scoreboard. Joined: Aug 12, Messages: 15, We will have to see if Trump gets elected before we have a new metric for crappy governance.
Eagle Pursuit , Oct 3, What joke? George Abitbol , Oct 3, Joined: Mar 17, Messages: 8, Location: Missouri. Joined: Nov 4, Messages: Hajee , Oct 3, Joined: Aug 23, Messages: 1, Location: Australia. I couldn't find the "Dan who???
0コメント