For anyone interested in this book, I recommend also reading "Non-Places: Introduction To An Anthropology Of Supermodernity" by Marc Augé. He lays out an interesting argument that the stress and the anxiety of the modern world is due to a collapse of distance — informatically, geographically, and temporally.
Simply put, the modern world feels bad because we're constantly engaging with information that we can't assimilate into a coherent model. In the past you could rely on simple and incorrect models of the world and generally be OK since your life was relatively local. Now, your life requires you to engage in a much larger sphere, one that is too large and changes too quickly to be understood.
That's very interesting - it aligns to something I've felt for a long time about the way the internet and modern media has made it so people just know about so many more things in the world and thus feel like they need to care about them. It's "eat your veggies because some starving African child doesn't even have that" but applied to everything, and juiced by live footage of a child dying of starvation.
This also, I think, leads to detachment from local issues. Why should I look into who's on my city council when I'm hearing about the French government falling apart or the mayor of New York doing crimes? There's always something bigger, worse, more important to the world going on somewhere and there's nothing you can do about it, but also every part of you feels like you should do something.
In the post, Tanner Greer excerpts from Andrew Yang's book The War on Normal People — here's the relevant quote in full, but I recommend clicking through and reading the whole post:
> In coming years it’s going to be even harder to forge a sense of common identity across different walks of life. A lot of people who now live in the bubble grew up in other parts of the country. They still visit their families for holidays and special occasions. They were brought up middle-class in normal suburbs like I was and retain a deep familiarity with the experiences of different types of people. They loved the mall, too.
> In another generation this will become less and less true. There will be an army of slender, highly cultivated products of Mountain View and the Upper East Side and Bethesda heading to elite schools that has been groomed since birth in the most competitive and rarefied environments with very limited exposure to the rest of the country.
> When I was growing up, there was something of an inverse relationship between being smart and being good-looking. The smart kids were bookish and awkward and the social kids were attractive and popular. Rarely were the two sets of qualities found together in the same people. The nerd camps I went to looked the part.
> Today, thanks to assortative mating in a handful of cities, intellect, attractiveness, education, and wealth are all converging in the same families and neighborhoods. I look at my friends’ children, and many of them resemble unicorns: brilliant, beautiful, socially precocious creatures who have gotten the best of all possible resources since the day they were born. I imagine them in 10 or 15 years traveling to other parts of the country, and I know that they are going to feel like, and be received as, strangers in a strange land. They will have thriving online lives and not even remember a car that didn’t drive itself. They may feel they have nothing in common with the people before them. Their ties to the greater national fabric will be minimal. Their empathy and desire to subsidize and address the distress of the general public will likely be lower and lower.
I'm not sure I at all agree with that quote though. Most of what he's describing was equally true of the old landed aristocracy or other wealthy families of the past. It feels like someone who didn't grow up rich now being rich and going "Wow, rich people live differently" as if that's some revelation and not something that's been true for centuries.
Who does he think went to Harvard and Yale and Princeton and Oxford and Cambridge before now? Those people felt as superior if not more superior to a random person in "normal america" than the current crop of new wealth. The Gettys and the Morgans were probably even more detached from the rest of the country than anyone is now and likely had more overt power over their lives than their modern equivalents.
I don't mean this as a defense of these people, just that "the elites don't have the best interests of the population at heart" is a complaint as old as civilization. I don't think Greer or Yang makes a compelling argument that the 2019 American moment is worse than even recent memory. Greer tries to make a point about how people had smaller goals in the past, and fought more for their local interests and prestige, something I'm both not sure I agree with and would love a citation for, and also looks past the fact that the major WASPy families did literally run the federal government for decades! Often to the detriment of states and regions they cared less about, which seems to be what he's claiming will be an issue with this new elite.
Simply put, the modern world feels bad because we're constantly engaging with information that we can't assimilate into a coherent model. In the past you could rely on simple and incorrect models of the world and generally be OK since your life was relatively local. Now, your life requires you to engage in a much larger sphere, one that is too large and changes too quickly to be understood.
PDF: https://monoskop.org/images/3/3c/Auge_Marc_Non-Places_Introd...