The Joy of Chaos

What's "Io, Saturnalia!"? The traditional greeting of Romans to each other when they met during the weeklong celebration of the dedication of the temple of Saturn. It was a winter festival of tomfoolery, merriment, and gift-giving that gave us a number of our Christmas traditions.

Some scholars use Saturnalia as a literary term, describing the chaos that upends an old balance or system in order to introduce a new, (usually) more perfect status quo. You see this a lot in Shakespeare, where the rising action kicks the legs out of what was going on before, throwing everything up into the air, but just when it looks like all will dissolve into chaos, a new order asserts itself. You see it most strongly in the comedies, where the growing chaos and confusion are suddenly brought to order by the courage of the hero or heroine, and happy couples are united with the promise of wedded bliss. You see it in the tragedies as well, such as in "Hamlet" where, with the stage littered with bodies, the brave good prince of the neighboring nation comes on stage to create a new order in Denmark.

So that's Saturnalia, a crucible of chaos that takes the now and forms it into tomorrow. Hence also the JMS quote up there.

In spite of the occasional declaration of the End of History, we find ourselves constantly in times of transition and transformation.

One of the big ones is supposedly the end of the American Century. The 20th century was our time, so the assumption goes, and the 21st belongs to the rising powers of Asia.

To which I say, "Poppycock!"

Not so much out of a sense of national pride, though there's some of that there, I'll admit. Primarily, I say this out of a reasonable sense of the ebb and flow of things, and the power of stupidity.

America's great strength comes not from our size, our resources, or our geographical position in the world. Those things help, but there are countries better positioned, richer in resources, and more populous than we are.

Our big strength is a cultural tradition in a system of fractious government.

What? Isn't fractiousness a bad thing?

What on earth makes you think that?

Ok, bear with me here. This takes a bit of explaining. The root of democracy, and such notions as the "free exchange of ideas" that we hear about in universities all the time, is that none of us knows as much as all of us. When partisans are bickering, on blogs, on news shows or talk radio, or in the deliberative chambers of legislature, democracy is working exactly as it was designed to. Ideas are being examined, tested, challenged, and changed, going through the fire to be refined, improved, and purified. That's how it's supposed to work.

What actually ends up happening, most of the time, is compromise. A little bit of this side's suggestions get used, and mixed with the other side's proposals. Which is ok. Yes, it means the good ideas get diluted, sure. But it also means the bad ideas get diluted as well. When you have everyone in agreement, or the decisions being made by a small few, the good ideas don't get diluted, but neither do the bad ones. And no matter how smart that small few are, there will be things they don't know, or don't understand properly.

And here's something we all know to be true: good ideas are few and precious. Bad ideas are a dime a dozen.

This is why the USSR fell apart and the US thrived, really. We had a bunch of people running around trying all sorts of crazy things. Some of those crazy things worked, and here we are. In the USSR, they had a much smaller circle of folks deciding what crazy things to try, so they ended up spending more time and effort on really bad ones, like trying to create a race of super-soldiers by crossbreeding people and apes. No, really, I'm serious. It's the same sort of thinking that leads wacky dictators to decide that the first stage in their plan to build nuclear weapons is to drive out of their countries everyone with last names like Einstein and Oppenheimer.

The more they do that, the tighter they squeeze, the further they pursue bad ideas, the more people flee to the US to escape. The more we argue and fight and cuss and scream, the harder we have to work to make sure our ideas will stand up to the scrutiny of the other side. And that's a good thing.