Look for the scientists!

The long-term cause of what is happening in our society is that we are losing our old industrial society. It is doing what it did once for us, that is to say, moving to those places where old hunting and gathering and agricultural societies are ready for the next step, to those places where the raw materials are to be found (or accessed), and where agricultural wages make factory jobs look really good, even when those wages are far below ours, here.

What we need to do is to look for the scientists. They are exploring what it is that comes after the age of coal and steel. It is they who are finding new energy sources, new ways to produce food, new avenues of communication, new understandings of what it is to be alive, and how life can prosper.

We need to go there! We need to provide encouragement and funds to train more scientists, and more engineers and craftsmen (sic, sorry, shorthand) to turn their findings into jobs and a better life. Re-doing the industrial revolution is a fool's errand. That is already being done, where industrial production is being re-established, and at wages we do not even want to go back to. It is very difficult to run for political office in Pennsylvania or Ohio or Michigan and know that the future of Pittsburgh and Akron and Detroit is not in what used to be, but in what must come next.

A wise, rational, civilized society knows that the past is prologue, and not recoverable, or even desirable. In plain language, some jobs aren't ever coming back: some workers will never find work again, or surely not that work. A civilized society does something about those people; does not simply ignore them, or con them. It helps them.

But the long-term solution is to look for the scientists. They are the genesis of what we can become.

Comments

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