Around the early 1970s, the great watch-word of the culture became "back."

This came primarily in two forms: back to nature (left), and back to the Bible (right). Under the hood both embrace the naturalistic fallacy (natural equals good) and the idea that there is a proper order from which we have deviated (sin, redemption, reconciliation). This manifested as the Religious Right, the anti-development wing of the Green movement, dogmatic Skepticism (a.k.a. scholasticism), and finally the alt-right.

The alt-right is the ultimate Hegelian synthesis. I'll get to more on what I think is happening today later.

IMHO this was driven by a number of things. These are some that jump out at me:

"Duck and cover"-- this was the generation that grew up with the looming terror of instant thermonuclear annihilation. A bit of ludditeism and retro fantasy is understandable.

Social and urban decay-- by the 1970s pollution was very bad in the West and cities were becoming vast ugly slums. Families were falling apart. Crime rates were rising. Reality did not look so good. See also: duck and cover.

Disillusionment with the collapse of the optimistic and futurist 1960s psychedelic counterculture. By the 1970s the Human Be-In type stuff had given way to Altamont and Manson and "acid casualties."

This was the generation that grew up on television. Broadcast TV is the most passive form of media in history and encourages escape into fictional idealized worlds.

Finally I think we got overwhelmed on an emotional level by rapid change and rapid discovery. Years ago I was thinking about this topic and came across a photo of the Earth from the Moon. I saw it through different eyes, saw it not as an amazing picture of accomplishment but as a terrifying image of our "frightful place in the universe" as H.P. Lovecraft so eloquently put it. Look at that picture. Do you see a God who cares about us? Do you see anything that will save us? I just see a speck of dust covered with a thin film of air floating in infinite black mystery. If an asteroid came along and whacked that speck of dust, nothing would care.

There were many other things too, like the de-funding of basic research in favor of "practical" research, but I see those as secondary effects rather than primary drivers. The primary drivers are deep philosophical and emotional currents.

Capitalism kept driving innovation, but not invention. We kept taking the stuff we'd invented in the first 2/3 of the 20th century and refining it. We took microprocessors from toys to today's behemoths and we took feature sizes down to <10nm. We made cars safer, faster, and more efficient. We cleaned up the air and the water (at least in the West). We incrementally improved health care.

But we stopped inventing. I think invention requires a fundamentally progressive worldview. To invent is to posit that there is a better way that has never existed, which negates the possibility that there is or was a better way today or in the past. Invention is fundamentally anti-tradition, anti-nature, anti-status-quo, and imaginative.

It goes without saying that if you accept the naturalistic fallacy (or the theistic version) or a dogmatic and scholastic approach to knowledge there is no point in inventing. Invention is either a sin, foolish, or futile.

Fast-forward to today:

I think it's ending. If I had to put a date on it, I'd say the day SpaceX landed its first rocket. Seems a good enough piece of symbolism to me.

One of the symptoms of its end is a final blow-out phase. The alt-right, as I said above, represents a total synthesis of the retro-left and the retro-right. It combines concrete manifestations of the luddite left (anti-tech, anti-GMO, anti-health-care, anti-vax, etc.) with concrete manifestations of both the religious and secular reactionary right. As such it has swept up both 70s-liberals and 70s-conseratives. Under the hood it is driven by explicitly reactionary traditionalist thought, including but not limited to the likes of Julius Evola.

The alt-right's embrace of racism and sexism also represents a final total embrace of the naturalistic fallacy. The idea of global human equality is profoundly unnatural. Racism is natural. Gender inequality is natural.

It's true that the alt-right is partly a millennial thing, but it's being driven by boomers and late-boomers.

My prediction is that the alt-right will flame out spectacularly and then the 70s will finally be over.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dNMhl7YuKEY

Edit: Thiel's backing of Trump and the alt-right is why I doubt I agree with him about the causes here. Either that or he's playing insanely "meta" 5D-chess and is actually trying to accelerate the demise of the zeitgeist by driving it to its final culmination. That would be true high magic, but I doubt it.

Edit #2: our frightful place in the universe: https://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/moon_and_earth_lroe...

> The alt-right's embrace of racism and sexism

The scope of these terms has been expanded significantly. I no longer care what anyone considers to be 'racist' or 'sexist'; I care what their values are, and if I consider them of worth.

EDIT: 'alt-right' may have changed too. Some seem to thing it just means 'alternate right', others 'code-name for racists'.

"If you have always believed that everyone should play by the same rules and be judged by the same standards, that would have gotten you labeled a radical 50 years ago, a liberal 25 years ago and a racist today."

Thomas Sowell

That doesn't make any sense. Racists inherently judge with a different standard.

I'm not familiar with either the quote or the person quoted, but I'm guessing it's an assertion that people who believe

> that everyone should play by the same rules and be judged by the same standards

don't buy into affirmative action, and are labeled as racists by people who do.

Maybe, but more likely concepts like "it's not possible (or important) for a black american to be racist", or "when a white person makes fun of a black, they are racist, when a black person makes fun of a while they are being ironic".

Different to what? Racists hold people of different races to different standards, and so do the people who call others racist for refusing to do this.

That's a lot of interesting writing. Thanks.

Though I think the alt-right is an embracing of the worldview of identity politics that mainly comes from the left. It's a if-we-can't-join-in-fight-them response to picking sides. That's to say I don't think it's a social conclusion to a rejection of future improvements or something.

Also, if you look at my sibling post, I indirectly point out how I think some of the implications of progressive social change have inhibited progress in other areas.

In other words, maybe we're not innovating in space travel because we're too busy innovating in generational mobility, family structure, and other things. It's unreasonable, I think, to assume that changes of that magnitude wouldn't have unintended consequences in other areas.

Identity politics is quite regressive. I left that out but it's another example of 70s-liberalism and as such has become a part of the great synthesis.

I'm not sure I buy the latter part. The still-innovative cities and regions of the USA tend to be more on the socially liberal side of the divide, and if you look into the people who were responsible for all that basic invention in the past you'll find quite a mixed bag of social viewpoints from Marxism to early-SJW-ism to Naziism and eugenics to everything else you can think of.

At best I think there is little correlation between proximate political views and capacity for invention. But on a deeper level I think all of these people had a basic futuristic orientation to their thinking.

Edit: think of it this way:

Marxists, 60s "Leary era" hippies, post-WWII era American progressives, Eisenhower conservatives, and eugenicists and Nazis all believed that they were working to create a new and better world that was qualitatively superior to the existing world or to worlds of the past. They just disagreed about how and about what that new world would look like.

All the post-70s liberal and conservative regressive movements I discussed all agree that a new world is futile or foolish and that we should go back to something. They just disagree about why innovation is futile and what we should go back to.

The alt-right as the ultimate synthesis posits that we should go back to nature and the Bible and the pre-enlightenment social order. It's a totalistic anti-progressive movement.

I think you may find this interesting: https://meaningness.com/countercultures

The entire site is pretty fascinating, but your comments specifically reminded me of this subsection

"I saw the best minds of my generation... writing spam filters." — Neal Stephenson

Thank you for writing this, it adds a lot of clarity to thoughts that have been percolating in the back of my mind for a while. I always attributed the relative antagonism to innovation of the Left in the US to its Puritanical foundations, which people seem to have either never learned about or conveniently forget.

>The primary drivers are deep philosophical and emotional currents. "..." Capitalism kept driving innovation, but not invention.

Capitalism drove very little of the invention in earlier times, it was largely driven by World War I and II. WWII saw a large chunk of Europe and America's top minds bind together to stop the Axis, and then after the war their work could be integrated too. This led to a tremendous amount of knowledge that led to computers and the space projects among so much more. By the 70's the main gains were already fleshed out,and the system was back to private competition.

If it's a change of philosophy and behavior, it's a change towards peace, removing the absolute need to invent new things and the unquestioned resources to be able to do so.

Early 20th century has seen a dramatic change in universities: from teaching institutions, they became scientific ones. PHD programs were created in 19th century Germany, but became a requirement for professorship in most universities by the 20th century. The creation of these programs meant that being a scientist became a real job, and we began devoting resources to make sure the brightest minds could devote to scientific pursuit. This might have been a major reason of the scientific innovations that predates this "mini dark age".

To answer the question about the causes of this "mini Dark Age", I suggest two points to explain what has changed:

1) The transformation of the universities into research facilities has hit the moment of diminishing return. We scientists are now hyper-specialized and it is really hard to grasp even a tiny fraction of our field, whereas early 20th century scientists were expected to know maybe 10% of their discipline.

As sciences stabilize, great innovations become rarer and harder to achieve, and small incremental discoveries become the norm. The "publish or perish" environment makes scientists very cautious about their statements, non-working experiments are not published, preventing colleagues to avoid the same mistakes that must be made again and again.

2) The 70s, the decade associated with science slowing its innovation pace coincides with the liberalization of the financial market, known as neoliberalism. Welfare state is then discredited and privatization is then seen as the way to offer services. Banks, hedge funds and credit agencies are now, to put it (too) bluntly, ruling the world. This system of regulation of collective processes through finance is the world we know today and drives us toward a ever increasing productivity. It also creates an imperative for profits: some like it, some don't. But major innovation is not necessary to reap profits, like science was necessary to maintain the domination of some states over others. Major corporations do prefer small incremental changes. Heard about this new thing, iPhone 7? Not a big innovation, but perfect to turn steady quarterly profits. The way big oil consortia are now panicking even show that sometimes, innovation kills profit.

Today, scholarly grants are highly dependent on industrial partnerships, which foster mostly new uses of old tech. It is much a safer investment than trying to make fundamental changes. The productivity imperative, first implemented in factories, is now imposed on universities.

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One of today biggest hype in tech, deep learning, was created (partly) because Y. Bengio from Université de Montréal chose to spit on big corporate money to focus on fundamental research. Another great scientist, Peter Higgs (Higgs like in Higgs boson!) said that if he had to comply to the productivity required of today's young scientists, he would never had been able to think what is driving today's physics.

Both of them had to go against the flow, but how many promising scientists chose the stable, profitable, corporate career path? You guys know more than me.

I'd say all our innovative energy is going into social experimentation. Maybe that's the trade-off you'd choose, but if you look at what the government spends its various forms of capital on, it's mostly ways to make up for changing social structures: no more hometowns, no more social pride, no more multi-generation homes, no more homemakers, fewer multi-parent homes.

To get in front of a probable counterargument, the government also spends a lot (not as much as people think, but a lot) on military ventures, but not more than it did in the early 20th century.