The Gramsci Gap reminds me of Empire of the Sun, a 1987 movie where a young Christian Bale is in a Japanese POW camp during WWII. His American mentor (John Malkovich) scolds him at his excitement that things are going poorly for the Japanese and the war appears to be ending. He says (according to IMDB): "It's at the beginning and end of war that we have to watch out. In between, it's like a country club." Even in such wretched circumstances as being a prisoner of war, if the mechanisms and rules and paradigms are stable and understood, a shrewd operator can find positions of advantage. Indeed Malkovich's character Basie seems to fit the anarch quite well, remaining inscrutable to his cohort (for he has no friends), and always managing to slip the rules despite being given no formal exemptions.
I was a child in a military family and we moved every 2 years, so I really felt Basie's admonition in my bones. I faced repeated liminal periods, where it seemed as soon as I figured out the folk mores and social order of my immediate surroundings I was transplanted to start the process over again. I remain obsessed with and keenly aware of all things liminal to this day, and wholeheartedly agree that "western" society is facing such a period now.
are you sure about "Asia didn’t “fail” when Europe leaped ahead a thousand years ago."? i might characterize colonialism in south America, Africa and Asia (culminating in the British empire) as such failure.
OTOH, is Singapore an example of a complex machine built from scratch and still working (having gone through changes on the fly)?
I mean, it’s still there chugging along with 3 billion people. GDP share is almost back to pre-colonial era. It didn’t get erased like Incan or Mayan civilization. And the colonial era for most part simply replaced native extractive elites with foreign for a while without really touching the base. The Brit’s were just the latest in a long line. And Singapore btw isn’t quite as from-scratch as it seems.
do not know enough about singapore to comment. that teh civilization did not get erased is questionable about china. as a working civilization, i think there was a period around 1900 where teh answer was no. same in several other SE Asia countries. but maybe we need to define "fail" first. would you agree that syria is a "fail"?
My calibration is erasure comparable to companies that fully wind down, returning any capital and labor assets to the markets to redeploy. The east India company does not exist anymore. Someone bought the brand for an unrelated boutique store. By contrast all of Asia has very strong continuity with all of its past. Continuous inhabitance is an incredibly powerful force.
by this definition, enough of inca and maya civilizations survived so they are not a "fail". i think this measure is too strict because new builds on old, like building a new house with stones that formed a part of the old house. add to this the fact that the local civilization would anyway change over 500 years, the result is that you cannot easily distinguish failure from success.
i feel that for many countries what was recognizable as the machine (the noise it makes?) changed in a step-wise manner due to western influence. This is true also for other great conquering events in history.
not quite. as i am changing the ship. i would rather focus on what "fail" means. i suggest that becoming a dead player, as defined by Samo Burja, or losing the property of being alive, as defined by Christopher Alexander, are a good measure.
The notion of the Gramsci gap reminds me of William Ogburn’s “cultural lag”. My mind has always used the image of gears when picturing the different rates of change between tech, culture, and government. Maybe a Gramsci gap is kind of like slippage between these gears?
It would seem that pragmatically you never want to be a monster--that being a monster leaves you face-down on the trail with arrows in your back. You want to be a resident of Independence, Missouri around 1910, a world with a nice green town square, and in that town square is a statue commemorating a local arrow casualty from Independence's early founding days. Stroke your chin thoughtfully, then continue on to get ice cream.
One major monster-identifier might be whether the candidate in question understands this.
Does every disaster--Vietnam, bad forest management, 1930s Ukraine--initially present itself as an efficiency problem?
The Gramsci Gap reminds me of Empire of the Sun, a 1987 movie where a young Christian Bale is in a Japanese POW camp during WWII. His American mentor (John Malkovich) scolds him at his excitement that things are going poorly for the Japanese and the war appears to be ending. He says (according to IMDB): "It's at the beginning and end of war that we have to watch out. In between, it's like a country club." Even in such wretched circumstances as being a prisoner of war, if the mechanisms and rules and paradigms are stable and understood, a shrewd operator can find positions of advantage. Indeed Malkovich's character Basie seems to fit the anarch quite well, remaining inscrutable to his cohort (for he has no friends), and always managing to slip the rules despite being given no formal exemptions.
I was a child in a military family and we moved every 2 years, so I really felt Basie's admonition in my bones. I faced repeated liminal periods, where it seemed as soon as I figured out the folk mores and social order of my immediate surroundings I was transplanted to start the process over again. I remain obsessed with and keenly aware of all things liminal to this day, and wholeheartedly agree that "western" society is facing such a period now.
are you sure about "Asia didn’t “fail” when Europe leaped ahead a thousand years ago."? i might characterize colonialism in south America, Africa and Asia (culminating in the British empire) as such failure.
OTOH, is Singapore an example of a complex machine built from scratch and still working (having gone through changes on the fly)?
I mean, it’s still there chugging along with 3 billion people. GDP share is almost back to pre-colonial era. It didn’t get erased like Incan or Mayan civilization. And the colonial era for most part simply replaced native extractive elites with foreign for a while without really touching the base. The Brit’s were just the latest in a long line. And Singapore btw isn’t quite as from-scratch as it seems.
do not know enough about singapore to comment. that teh civilization did not get erased is questionable about china. as a working civilization, i think there was a period around 1900 where teh answer was no. same in several other SE Asia countries. but maybe we need to define "fail" first. would you agree that syria is a "fail"?
My calibration is erasure comparable to companies that fully wind down, returning any capital and labor assets to the markets to redeploy. The east India company does not exist anymore. Someone bought the brand for an unrelated boutique store. By contrast all of Asia has very strong continuity with all of its past. Continuous inhabitance is an incredibly powerful force.
by this definition, enough of inca and maya civilizations survived so they are not a "fail". i think this measure is too strict because new builds on old, like building a new house with stones that formed a part of the old house. add to this the fact that the local civilization would anyway change over 500 years, the result is that you cannot easily distinguish failure from success.
i feel that for many countries what was recognizable as the machine (the noise it makes?) changed in a step-wise manner due to western influence. This is true also for other great conquering events in history.
We’re now down to ship of Theseus arguments
not quite. as i am changing the ship. i would rather focus on what "fail" means. i suggest that becoming a dead player, as defined by Samo Burja, or losing the property of being alive, as defined by Christopher Alexander, are a good measure.
The notion of the Gramsci gap reminds me of William Ogburn’s “cultural lag”. My mind has always used the image of gears when picturing the different rates of change between tech, culture, and government. Maybe a Gramsci gap is kind of like slippage between these gears?
Fascinating as always vgr. Ezra Klein today just wrote an article with the same Gramsci quote as the lede and conclusion - https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/12/opinion/ai-climate-change-low-birth-rates.html
The vibes are becoming clearer. The interregnum of "monsters" ....
interregnum as in Asimov's "Foundation" (shrunk from 30k years to just 1k years)?
It would seem that pragmatically you never want to be a monster--that being a monster leaves you face-down on the trail with arrows in your back. You want to be a resident of Independence, Missouri around 1910, a world with a nice green town square, and in that town square is a statue commemorating a local arrow casualty from Independence's early founding days. Stroke your chin thoughtfully, then continue on to get ice cream.
One major monster-identifier might be whether the candidate in question understands this.
Does every disaster--Vietnam, bad forest management, 1930s Ukraine--initially present itself as an efficiency problem?