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Being in technology, you have a front-row seat to the concept of elective decline, or the idea that civilization's decline is often a collective but intentional choice, rather than the result of external stress. It seems sad, to a historian, that a great empire would "collapse" (an affair that usually happen imperceptibly over hundreds of years) but the reality is that it's the unintended product of millions of individuals making self-interested and possibly self-beneficial decisions... that end up not keeping up or advancing the civilization. At some point, they just decide that it's not worth it to be civilized anymore, and investment ceases. Since the 1970s, we've seen elective decline in the U.S., in science, and in technology. Abstractly people want scientific progress, but no one wants to pay for it, and people within the masses would rather be guided by their resentment of academics than fight back when academic or research jobs get cut. When state legislatures cut funding for public universities, the hoi polloi don't care because their resentment for professors is stronger than their sense of a need to keep up the society. One might hope for Silicon Valley to be better, and look to it for leadership, and it may have kept its integrity for longer, but the current "M&A has replaced R&D" era is just fucking disgusting. It's easy to focus the hatred on a few unlikeable celebrity founders (and I've done my share of that) but the truth is that the problem is really deep and probably unalterable. We have a front-row seat, if we work in science and technology in the U.S., for elective decline-- why it happens, the individual actors who push it forward (not wanting decline, but valuing self-interest more), and the often one-way erosion of trust that tends to make it irreversible-- but we have no power to change it. And, just as one might read about a civilization that collapsed 3,000 years ago and think, "They would have been fine if they just <X>", we can easily come up with solutions that will work but never see implementation, because (as seems to be a constant of human organizations) the wrong people are in charge. |
What does "civilization" have to do with some trend in U.S. science funding, that probably doesn't exist? If you think the U.S. is in technological decline... how come oil production has drastically increased? Why are cars so much safer now? If people don't want to spend money on science and technology, why do we spend more on education than any other nation? Why should we infer anything from state legislatures' funding of universities, from which the best and brightest move out of state, which make more sense to fund nationally?
I'm glad you've heard of words like "civilization," "civilized," "hoi polloi," and "fucking." Next time, try saying reality-based things with them instead of antiplatitudes pulled from thin-air.