The
World Known to Me Is Fading Away
By Paul
Craig Roberts
January
01, 2019 "Information
Clearing House"
-
In
a few hours it will be another new year, 2019. I
can remember when 1984 seemed far in the future,
both as a calendar date and George Orwell’s
predicted dystopia, to which 9/11 and the
digital revolution gave birth in the 21st
century. Now I find myself 35 years past 1984
and a stranger in a strange land.
Over
these holidays two occurrences brought the
strangeness of the present time home to me.
One was
the arrival of the memoir, From the
Cast-Iron Shore (University of Notre Dame
Press, 2019) by my friend and onetime colleague,
Francis Oakley, an historian of the medieval era
and past president of Williams College. The
other was the report that a Japanese man had
married a hologram.
https://www.cnn.com/2018/12/28/health/rise-of-digisexuals-intl/index.html
Little
doubt that feminism has made women troublesome,
but preference for a hologram indicates a
shifting preference for the virtual over the
real. Many in the younger generations have
friends they have never met face to face. They
join together in teams to play Internet games,
or they open themselves to the world of
strangers on Facebook. It seems that digital
interaction with people thousands of miles away
is replacing the human interaction of a sports
team or a date consisting of male-female
face-to-face interaction.
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I have
read reports that young women pay for their
university educations, if education it is, by
engaging in digital sex work. They display
themselves naked and provocatively in various
sexual positions assessable on the Internet
while engaging in sexual conversation, and the
young men find this form of sexual engagement
preferable to face to face contact with a woman.
The saying is: “It is cheaper than a date and
without commitments.”
On
beaches I observe attractive women clothed in
little but two shoe strings, a sight that would
have driven the young men in my day crazy with
lust, totally ignored by guys fixated on their
cell phones. I sometimes think that people will
stop going to beaches as they will prefer the
virtual experience to the real one.
Francis’ memoir reminds me that the world he and
I knew is over and done with, and that the kind
of education that we got, him more than me, is
no longer attainable.
The
memoir reminds me that the rise of a poor Irish
boy, via a Jesuit education and an Oxford
scholarship to the presidency of America’s most
prestigious college, and my own rise to
Assistant Secretary of the US Treasury, normally
a post conveyed to members of the financial
elite, is something that no longer takes place.
The ladders of upward mobility have been taken
down. The middle class itself is declining into
poverty.
Francis
tells of the Irish farms of his relatives. The
homes had no running water, and some not even an
outhouse. My own grandparents farm did have an
outhouse, but no running water. Water was
obtained by going outside to the wellhouse and
lowering the bucket into the well, and when
filled drawing the bucket back up. The only hot
water available was obtained by heating it on a
wood stove where meals were cooked. The kitchen
wood stove was usually the only heat for the
house.
Francis, who attended Oxford in the decade
following World War II, reports that there was
no running water in his rooms. A scout, defined
as “a domestic worker at a college at Oxford
University,” brought a porcelain basin and a jug
of hot water to the rooms in the mornings.
When I
was at Oxford, as a rare post-graduate at Merton
College, in the second decade after World War
II, I could only stay in rooms during summers
(as rooms were reserved for undergraduates
during terms) when I returned for collaborations
with my former professor. If memory serves,
there was running cold water, but full bathroom
facilities were located outside the rooms. It
wasn’t that much different from my undergraduate
days at Georgia Tech where bathroom facilities
were located at the end of each hall of rooms in
the dorms.
If time
and events permit, I intend to return to
Francis’ memoir, which is full of information
about how the past, despite the hardships,
produced more successful and more honorable
people than we have around us today.
Dr. Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of
the Treasury for Economic Policy and associate
editor of the Wall Street Journal. He was
columnist for Business Week, Scripps Howard News
Service, and Creators Syndicate. He has had many
university appointments. His internet columns
have attracted a worldwide following. Roberts'
latest books are
The Failure of Laissez Faire
Capitalism and Economic Dissolution of the West,
How America Was Lost,
and
The Neoconservative Threat to
World Order.
The
views expressed in this article are solely those
of the author and do not necessarily reflect the
opinions of Information Clearing House.
