Small Acts of Good, US as Third World Country, and How Culture Changes

Grab bag of different thoughts from a McDonald's booth

I’ve been home for the last week, which means each morning I’ve been walking my favorite eight mile route, and then spending my afternoons in the local McDonald’s, reading, being too active on Twitter, talking to the employees, and writing.

I’ve been doing this morning walk for over six years, in all types of weather. It’s effectively a large ellipse on smaller roads around a stream/marsh/swamp/quagmire. The official name is Swarte Kill, or Black Creek in Dutch, a vestigial reminder that I’m in the land that once was New Amsterdam.

It’s consequently a different walk from when I’m traveling, more akin to a stew of meditation, exercise, and maintenance than exploration. I still learn from it though, by listening to audiobooks¹, which I can focus on because I’ve been on this route hundreds of times.

I believe it’s important to strike a balance between experiential and book learning, and these periods at home allow me to do that, because I’ve found it difficult to read while traveling, even when on long flights, bus trips, and walks, where the allure of the new is too distracting.

The walks are also about maintenance. When people ask for walking advice, I try to emphasize the importance of consistency. I’ve learned to try and never change my weekly mileage by more or less than forty percent, which is especially important as I’ve aged, when nagging injuries are more common and longer lasting. After a certain point, the weekend warrior approach becomes a recipe for almost guaranteeing a serious injury, and a daily walk is the way to forestall that.

It’s also simply a beautiful route, with a fair amount of the wild, and that alone is reason enough to do it. It can be a little sad however, since I can tell the season by which animals I am saving from becoming road kill. Right now it’s still snapping turtle graduation season, although sometimes it’s more about salamanders, and snakes.

These rescues, moments of joy among the sadness of death by car, give me immense satisfaction, despite knowing it’s not rational — a warm, squirming drop in the bucket compared to all the flattened ones I pass by daily. It’s a small good which teenage utilitarian, positivist me would have rolled my eyes at. Not that I had a cold heart then, or didn’t appreciate our cold-blooded friends, but I didn’t fully understand the significance of these acts of “irrational” good, beyond maybe at the psychological level. Sure they make you feel good, but you also eat hamburgers, hot dogs, and you probably squash a hundred others while driving to visit the McDonald’s, so what’s up with that?

All which is true, at a book smarts level, but certainly not at an experiential level, because that great satisfaction, and even meaning, can come from saving a small, useless, squirming life, speaks to something more spiritual going on.

Almost a decade ago I became attached to a tiny one-eyed frog, a spring peeper that I found on my driveway. Figuring its deformation, coupled with the allure to being on my driveway, probably meant a short life, I brought it inside, named it Pip (one eye, get it), and had it for two years.

It was a complicated time for me, intellectually, and I was questioning many of my beliefs, but I was still firmly a secular utilitarian, still thirty years later channeling my know-it-all teenager self, and so when I wrote about Pip, I concluded,

For me, like all my forays into biology and nature, it begs the question, what is the point. As I wrote last year, when I first found Pip:

(Studying nature) has actually made me more cynical. I wish I could say otherwise, and spout on about the beauty of life, living, and creatures. I can’t though. I do respect how remarkably agile, functional, efficient, and diverse it is, how there are so many different strategies for staying alive. But the actual being alive part, unless you are very very very lucky, seems an awfully pointless exercise.

Spending the year trying to make Pip happier, made me even more cynical. For frogs, being alive seems awfully pointless AND joyless exercise. A rote experience of just being a frog.

For humans, it is another reminder we don’t help animals for them, but for us – to try and give our own pointless lives a little more meaning.

I was on the cusp of some big intellectual changes then, ones I’ve gotten to the other side of, and I now feel very different, and am embarrassed to read that only nine years ago I’d gotten it entirely wrong. While we do help animals primarily to make us feel good, we do that because it is a reminder that there is a point to life, which isn’t grounded in the rational, but in the spiritual. Those daily acts of small “irrationality” are attempts to maintain our soul in an overly rational dehumanizing world. It is a very human moment in an otherwise cold world, that’s fulfilling because we are not computers, not a mechanical being run by algorithms, but a spiritual being aligned towards the good.

These little acts of good, towards frogs, but especially towards other humans, is a part of us that speaks towards high purpose. Yes, I will use saving a tiny frog to imply the sacred dimension of existence.

There are limits to my cold-blooded empathy of course, like the sunny and humid morning, after a rainy night, when I became fixated on all the earthworms baking themselves to death along the side of the road. A mass suicide that I had to ignore if I wanted to get anywhere, a recognition that in my own ordo amoris earthworms fell below frogs, turtles, and salamanders. Thanks St. Augustine.

I will be here another week and if you find yourself near New Paltz, come say hello. I am usually at the front booth of the local McDonald’s with my computer, unless the franchise owner is here, because that is also his favorite seat.

Until I get back on the road (October 1st), here are some scattered thoughts, there is no unifying theme, beyond things I was thinking about while walking this week.

The US as Third World Country

Eight years ago I wrote a piece² that went viral (for me) arguing that the US was becoming a third-world nation (think Argentina, Peru, or Nigeria), a part of the world I was very familiar with, from both my childhood of travel, and my banking career which was focused on distressed countries.

Then I wrote about a four-stage sequence of dysfunction that defined the politics and social structure of these countries. A waterfall of decay, deterioration, and ultimately societal destruction.

Besides the obvious physical decline, what also dissolves in each stage is the notion of a common good. That ultimately is more important then the visible material loss, because a shared national ethos is the only thing that ultimately holds a country together, making it something more than an opportunistic economic and legal union.

More on all that below, but here are the four stages as I see them:

1. Extreme Inequality

There exists an elite minority that assumes control of almost everything: politics, business, and most importantly, cultural norms. While they are much wealthier, the more defining feature is they are almost entirely removed from the majority of the country, both physically and in their worldview (what is right versus what is wrong). They are the guardian class that doesn't understand the plebes they are making the rules (written and unwritten) for.

In terms of a common good, they view themselves as being the high lords of it, meaning they are the only ones who fully understand it, and are consequently responsible for managing it.

Their physical and intellectual isolation, where they rarely have to deal with the consequences of their actions, is the original sin that can grow into a division between them and the masses on what the common good is.

If this isolation persists for enough time, it leads to:

2. No Compromise

Because the wealthy minority and the poorer majority develop two separate realities (given their physical, economic, and cultural differences), different understandings of the common good, each side develops fundamentally different worldviews. Consequently, they view each other as being lesser, immoral, and subhuman people. Finding a middle ground in this environment becomes close to impossible because the other side is the Devil, and you don't make a deal with the Devil.

This leads to:

3. Corruption

Political power ping-pongs, in dramatic fashion, between these two groups, because whoever ends up in office focuses less on building a functional society, and more on enriching their friends and harming their enemies. This growing governmental incompetence, with basic services eroded, is coupled with increasing centralized power as they expand governments reach, while weakening prior checks on it, all in the double speak name of restoration. This “breaking of norms” is steady, and justified because the other side did it, so we must also do it.

This naturally leads to:

4. Cynicism

As things break down, everybody finally ends up giving up on any shared notion of a common good and focusing instead on just themselves and their immediate family, with little if any regard for the laws. At this stage, people begin fending for themselves, and the classic symptom is when elites begin to take the majority of their money offshore, and the idea of paying taxes becomes something only the dumb do. Citizenship is an obligation and burden that must be navigated, not something to be proud of. As they say in Argentina, you end up with a hotel mentality toward citizenship, only checked in temporarily.

This brings about complete dysfunction. It makes everything—economy, politics, roads, bridges, police, schools—secondary and so they decay. Those who can leave do, making it worse.

Escalating political violence is part of this sequence, increasing the further down a society falls, and hastening the decline. It usually starts in stage two, because the other side is seen as "lesser humans," and then accelerates in stage three, as politics becomes a vehicle for revenge.

Where are we now in the US? When I originally wrote about this I thought we had entered stage two (No compromise), and now, eight years later, it's pretty clear we are through that and are at incipient stage three (corruption).

Predicting is close to impossible, but it's hard to get too optimistic about the immediate future of the US, although it's worth pointing out this process can reverse (look at much of Asia) and a downward trajectory isn't immediate, or fated.

The US has immense advantages relative to a Argentina, Peru, or Nigeria. We are far more robust, given our economic depth and breadth, as well as our history of stability. But that's not a guarantee of anything. Empires come and go, and we are currently the world's greatest empire, maybe the greatest the world has ever seen, and staying at that apogee isn't a given. It requires constant work, and that requires some compromise, which is exceptionally difficult once you are in this downward cycle³. (read Toynbee!)

Having said all that, I'm still a grudging optimist, because for the last five years I’ve seen, and heard, how much the rest of the world loves and admires the US. For all our problems, we really are the shining city upon a hill, a place of unbounded opportunity, wealth, and freedom. We wouldn’t really go and just throw that all away. Right?

Magic Realism as Reality

As an aside, the two, or more, realities that emerge in these third world countries, is why I’ve long believed Magic Realism came from Latin America, and why it is often the dominant fictional form of the third world.

Other than Gabriel García Márquez, and Álvaro Mutis⁴, I’m not a fan of the genre, which I believe has become an easy gimmick to feign depth, but it does capture the epistemological rupturing there, as well as how it consequently favors myths, folklore, and animism. If book smarts can’t be trusted, or agreed on, then why not revert to more intuitive and traditional forms of learning.

When I wrote about this before, a subscriber suggested I read Alejo Carpentier, who is widely considered the first modern Magic Realist, although he would have never used that name, preferring lo real maravilloso (the marvelous real) because this style doesn’t spring from the writer’s imagination, but rather exists inherently in Latin American history, nature, and culture.

As he wrote, after visiting Haiti:

“I was stepping on land where thousands of men, anxious for freedom, believed in Mackandal’s lycanthropic powers... I had breathed the atmosphere created by Henri Christophe... the marvelous real is found at every step in the lives of men who inscribed dates in the history of the Continent.”

Or rather it’s the revealed reality, which is too extreme, too marvelous, for Europeans to comprehend, as anything other than being magical.

I don’t disagree with that, although I would re-frame it as saying it’s too splintered, too fractured, for the first world mind to grapple with. Which is another way of saying there is no shared moral world, no shared common good, and consequently politics that have become extreme.

Given that he was a well to do Cuban intellectual living in Paris in the 1930s, it’s not surprising Alejo was also a Communist, although that he also clearly appreciated and understood the spiritual, mystical, and marvelous, is surprising, because Marxism at its heart is an overly hyper materialist understanding of the world. It’s a predictive theory of history by a man who believed you could chart the future, which is an insanely hubristic understanding of man’s abilities, especially if you believe reality to be so marvelous as to be beyond comprehension.

While I don’t like almost any current Magic Realism, I do admire that it exists. It’s similar to how Soviet-era writers, confronted with a reality so absurd and frustrating that it stretched their abilities to describe it, resorted to absurdity and deeply dark, cynical humor.

Words, language, and fiction are odd if you think about them too much, because there truly are realities and truths that can’t be described, where no amount of verbosity or vocabulary can do them justice. So you throw up your hands and embrace the ambiguity through Magic Realism, surrealism, dark humor, absurdism, and even science fiction and fantasy.

So How Does Culture Change in First Place?

In the essay on the US as third world country I assumed a bubbled elite will, with enough time, always end up having a different conception of the common good from the masses. Why is that?

I believe that because I’ve come to believe intellectual elites, especially since the late medieval period, are almost entirely incapable of preserving culture, viewing their role as not so much guardians, but agents of change, often dramatic change. That revolutionary spirit is what gives them a sense of meaning⁵.

This isn't by any means my original theory—many others have made this argument, and much of it comes from reading Richard Pipes, who sees the intellectual class's primary role as being a disruptive force, and a negative one. I’ve been especially influenced by his book, The Russian Revolution, and particularly the chapter on “The Intelligentsia,” whom he views as the instigators of the Communist revolution, not the proletariat, who he sees as being used as pawns and fodder in an intra-elite fight over power.

This contrasts with Plato, who envisioned intellectuals as a guardian class—nice in theory, but not how it generally plays out in practice these days.

That difference, between understanding themselves as revolutionaries rather than guardians, can only take place (as Pipes points out) if they also have a materialistic, utilitarian, and scientific view of the world, and consequently human nature. If you believe we are not children of God imbued with a soul who are humble in the face of our existence, but rather highly evolved animals that can shape our world, and consequently our future.

That understanding is a fundamental shift from a deep humility to one of immense pride, which occurred around the Enlightenment. We now see ourselves as masters of our own existence, which is why I’ve used the analogy of modern elites playing SimCulture, because it is a game to them (us, really, I am after all one). An immensely complex one, but ultimately a knowable and winnable one.

This hasn’t always been true, obviously. Different political and social structures have confined and channeled intellectuals toward preservation, sometimes because of a dominant pre-Enlightenment philosophy of there being a greater non-human power to which we must submit. We are not human engineers, but inheritors bound by sacred constraints.

Or through terror, and fear, where one exceedingly small group of elites (monarchs, dictators, and their courts) suppress all dissent and change because it disrupts their own narrow self interest.

I write all of this with little or no agenda, but as an academic, fascinated with how societies evolve.

I’m also not being nostalgic, or some out-of-touch person who loathes all change and thinks the peak of history was a time when thirty percent of children died in infancy. Rather, I think there are times when preservation of a society is better than change, especially in the modern era when we’ve already achieved so much.

I don't however think modern society is capable of prioritizing preservation, especially when it has such a large intellectual elite class that's so separated from the general public, and detached from the public's preferences, which is when change for the sake of change becomes especially dangerous.

Anyway, all of this is an excuse to highlight Akhenaten, who is my example that no matter what political structure exists, how stable it is, how repressive, elites always want to tinker, sometimes very dramatically. After 1,500 years of rather steady and consistent rule, he decided he really needed to change absolutely everything about Egyptian society.

A reminder no matter the political structure, or the ideology, there will always be intellectual revolutionaries.

Which is a good thing, otherwise we would still probably all be chasing after Kangaroos in the outback.

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I leave next Wednesday (October 1st) for Seoul, where I will spend a few days, before a week in Kunming (China), a week in Yangon (Myanmar), and finally a week in Taitung (SE Taiwan). If you are in any of those cities, please reach out.

I will hosting an open bar at the Woodstock LP bar (the one near the Sillim metro stop) in Seoul on Friday October 3rd, from 9 p.m. until whenever, so if you are around, stop by.

Also, I’ll be in Taipei the night of October 21st. If you are in town, a friend as booked a restaurant that evening, and you are welcome to come.

If interested with either, or for any reason, please reach out to me at Chris@arnade.com

Until next week!

1. I will die on the hill that listen to a book is reading it, especially fiction, where a good narrator can bring out so much nuance that can be lost in a quick read. Also, given how books used to be read out loud, in company of others, I feel it fits the proper 19th century tradition. Non-fiction is more complicated, but when I find a non-fiction book I like, I’ll buy a physical copy to co-read while listening.

2. On my Medium account, since deleted. Although apparently people have found it on the Wayback Machine.

3. Read Toynbee, who for some reason, after being highly touted only sixty years ago, has seemingly fallen into obscurity. I will admit to only having reads bits of him, and relied on summaries of his work, but I like what I’ve read, and admire his scope. Taking on big questions, with such depth, always should be admired.

4. My favorite Marquez are

• In Evil Hour

• One Hundred Years of Solitude

• The Autumn of the Patriarch

• Love in the Time of Cholera

My favorite Mutis is The Adventures and Misadventures of Maqroll, which is one of my all time favorite works of fiction.

5. I frame it in this direction because I believe that is the far more common trajectory of the process, where change, or cultural drift, comes from above rather than from below.