[Peace-discuss] Careless people & societal collapse?

[Szoke, Ron]

1. Careless people?  

A ‘Great Gatsby’ Quote Takes On New Resonance
People critical of the president’s and other Republicans’ behavior have been sharing a line from the Fitzgerald novel about the wealthy characters whose “carelessness” harms everyone around them.

By Ian Prasad Philbrick
NYT  Oct. 7, 2020

It could have been any day on the internet: A critical comment, not naming President Trump or his Republican allies but clearly aimed at them, circulated on social media.

But the passage shared over the past few days by educators, writers and veterans of past presidential administrations came from an unlikely source: “The Great Gatsby,” F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel about greed and aspiration published nearly a century ago.

“They were careless people,” Nick Carraway, the narrator, concludes about Tom and Daisy Buchanan, characters whose excesses ultimately destroy the lives of those around them. “They smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”

For those who shared the passage online, Fitzgerald’s indictment of the rich, blasé Buchanans in the novel’s final pages seemed to fit an administration that has attempted to downplay the pandemic, even after Trump and other top Republicans tested positive for Covid-19.

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2.  Societal collapse ahead?  

Society is About to Fall Apart?
Ben Ehrenreich
NYT Magazine 11/04/20 

When I first spoke with Joseph Tainter in early May, he and I and nearly everyone else had reason to be worried. A few days earlier, the official tally of Covid-19 infections in the United States had climbed above one million, unemployment claims had topped 30 million and the United Nations had warned that the planet was facing “multiple famines of biblical proportions.” George Floyd was still alive, and the protests spurred by his killing had not yet swept the nation, but a different kind of protest, led by white men armed with heavy weaponry, had taken over the Michigan State Legislature building. The president of the United States had appeared to suggest treating the coronavirus with disinfectant injections. Utah, where Tainter lives — he teaches at Utah State — was reopening its gyms, restaurants and hair salons that very day.
The chaos was considerable, but Tainter seemed calm. He walked me through the arguments of the book that made his reputation, “The Collapse of Complex Societies,” which has for years been the seminal text in the study of societal collapse, an academic subdiscipline that arguably was born with its publication in 1988. “Civilizations are fragile, impermanent things,” Tainter writes. Nearly every one that has ever existed has also ceased to exist, yet “understanding disintegration has remained a distinctly minor concern in the social sciences.” It is only a mild overstatement to suggest that before Tainter, collapse was simply not a thing.
If Joseph Tainter, now 70, is the sober patriarch of the field, it is not a role he seems to relish. His own research has moved on; these days, he focuses on “sustainability.” But even in his most recent work his earlier subject is always there, hovering like a ghost just off the edge of each page. Why, after all, would we worry about sustaining a civilization if we weren’t convinced that it might crumble?

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[ Curiously, does not mention the 2005 book by Jared Diamond, _Collapse_: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (Penguin pb, 575 pp.). ~ RSz. ]  
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