Ray Woodcock’s Current Thoughts

The exploration of paradox was an important development in philosophical logic during the 21st century. People gradually quit thinking that contradiction proves or disproves anything. This momentous change meant that, for the first time in some 2,000 years in some cultures, people began to realize that things are commonly true and false at the same time, in various regards. It was no longer that there might be black or white or shades of grey; it was, rather, that there were black and white and shades of grey.

This philosophical development had an important ramification in the realm of slavery studies. With the practical abolition of contradiction, it came to be recognized that people are always simultaneously free and enslaved. The question was no longer whether someone would be a slave; it was, rather, how s/he would be a slave. The strong – most of the strong, that is, in most times and most places – would generally be willing and able to force most of the weak to serve them; but in what ways?

The modern manorial movement grew out of the very belated realization that people specialize. Some are very practical; some are not. Some of the world’s brightest people cannot figure out how to dress themselves in the morning. Those who were given power over others, as a result of the manorial movement, came to have it because of their practical skills in arranging affairs of this world. They were, for the most part, highly competent in what they did, but one would not generally confuse them with the truly brilliant or insightful type of person.

Practicality, combined with the mandatory concern for people’s welfare and balance of competing priorities, explains why so many of the first liege lords were drawn from the ranks of the old judiciary, as it existed up through the early decades of the 21st century. As a prominent jurist of that era pointed out, “The judge’s essential activity . . . is the making of a large number of decisions in rapid succession, with little feedback concerning their soundness or consequences. People who are uncomfortable in such a role – and perhaps they are the most introspective, sensitive, and scrupulous people – do not become judges, do not stay judges, or are unhappy judges” (Posner, 1990, p. 192). Certainly practicality had a place in this business, along with an ordinary – that is, not to say a passionate – concern for the general welfare.

One thing these liege lords recognized, from the outset, was that people were just not very good at taking care of themselves. They were, in particular, not very good at deciding how many children they could raise properly. Those least suited for the responsibilities involved in heading a nuclear family of the 20th and early 21st centuries were, too often, those who got themselves most deeply mired in it – starting their families young and keeping at it for entire decades, often with insufficient food, clothing, attention, love, and even interest in the bare existence of all those kids they were begetting.

The liege lords, meanwhile, were the sort who were comfortable with making sweeping decisions in such regards. They did tend to bring a certain cultural perspective into that sphere. Research has demonstrated (too late, as often happens) that they frequently imposed their own values in ways that were destructive of entire cultures and lifestyles among certain socioeconomic groups. Regardless, by the middle of the 21st century – by, that is, their early years in operation – the liege lords had already perceived clearly that, according to their standards, this state of affairs among child-bearers could not continue.

One of the driving factors behind that conclusion was the life expectancy gap that had emerged and widened during the previous half-century. A widening wage gap was, of course, old news by the dawn of the Asian Century. Everyone knew – indeed, Americans had long expected and accepted – that the most highly skilled and sought-after leaders would command incomes vastly greater than those paid to the entirely replaceable individuals of the rank and file. This much had been part and parcel of American capitalism since at least the 19th century. But by 2010 the backlash against overpayment of top executives brought stockholder groups into cooperation with anticorporate and antiglobalist groups in the call for change. Such groups’ motives differed, of course – the stockholder groups believed that overcompensation sometimes had a counterproductive effect on executive competence – but from that time forward there were fewer extremes of executive overcompensation.

The wage gap that concerned most people thus tended to involve, not the infrequent extremely overpaid chief executive officer, but rather the gap between what came to be known as the Living Wage and the Dying Wage. While economic well-being could be (and was) measured in theory as a continuum, in terms of the numbers of dollars available per person within a household, in practice people tended to be drawn toward standards of living that either were, or were not, conducive to their continued survival and well-being. At a certain point, the combination of economic numbers and psychosocial conditions tended to demonstrate a statistical differentiation between a surviving middle class and a struggling and dying underclass – even though, in the affectation of the time, people who called themselves “middle class” out of pride had long been, in fact, far below a middle-class standard of living.

In any case, though, it was not the wage gap that forced a change. The change element was, again, the life expectancy gap that became more evident, and grew wider, following the collapse of the so-called middle class lifestyle. After an extended period during which the life expectancies of ordinary Americans grew steadily longer, the trend began to reverse itself for the increasingly visible underclass. People without sufficient resources to afford increasingly expensive health care, freshwater sanitation, and natural foods – forced, that is, to rely upon the relatively primitive artificial foods of the time, and to accept a certain amount of daily exposure to drug- and antiseptic-resistant viruses – found themselves increasingly vulnerable to lethal maladies that their overburdened health care sector could no longer address effectively.

As stated by an epidemiologist of the time (Srinivar, 2024, p. 117), “Detroit is the new Calcutta.” A population driven especially to coastal and Great Lakes cities by drought in the interior, concentrated in city centers by contractionist theories of burban development, and no longer able to live off the land – to subsist, that is, on the surviving disease- and drought-resistant but inedible supergrains without sophisticated processing – found itself experiencing, on those city streets, a form of existence that had been assumed to be a thing of the past. For the underclass, life expectancies began to decline precipitously, and continued to do so for some time.

Power rides upon principle. It is not certain that the liege lords would ever have been able to secure the sweeping authority they did acquire, even under such conditions of hardship, if they had not been supported by a rather virulent responsibilism. The land, said many, should not be expected to carry people whom it, itself, cannot support, and parents should not be burdened, by self-destructive sociocultural habits and expectations, with children whom they, themselves, could not reliably raise, feed, educate, and otherwise perpetuate in survival. Thus, in a new development in the ancient argument between Plato and Aristotle, it gradually came to be accepted that a child was, in fact, both the responsibility and the property of the entire community, rather than of those who created it.

On that basis, parenthood came to be seen, not as some unwritten birthright, but rather as a natural condition, like the ability to become intoxicated, that may appropriately be indulged by some people, sometimes, but that should not become a general habit and should perhaps never be practiced by those who cannot do so responsibly. Later, under the care and guidance of the liege lords, people became more or less naturally associated with a private rather than public overseer in all capacities of life; hence the ascendance of the liege lords and their tendency toward population restriction.

These were not, after all, times in which people would support themselves through manual labor on the land. A larger population did not mean greater prosperity. To the contrary, what could be produced was being produced, nearly as efficiently as possible, by a relatively small population. The rest were surplusage. They would literally eat into the resources of the city and, later, of the liege lord. The quest for ever more habitable lands argued strongly against the previous century’s rapid despoilation of the countryside; now there were the sons and daughters of liege lords who expected their own manors upon attaining majority. In short, the entire productive system of the 19th and 20th centuries was turned on its head, with views of excessive population being an important aspect of the process.

It would be incorrect to represent this process as entirely peaceful and gradual. There was one additional, important development. Declining life expectancies brought increasingly casual attitudes toward survival. Where life was cheap, it was easily spent. People who might not have dedicated themselves to violent attacks upon the middle class and its supportive authorities, if they had expected themselves to live into their sixties or beyond, were increasingly willing to undertake such attacks as their life expectancies dropped well below that. Such statistics meant that, in practice, angry young men and women all knew someone who had died or been killed in some way that, they believed, was not supposed to happen to “middle-class” persons. They realized that the same sort of thing might happen to them next. Thus the tradeoff between conformity and resistance began to be recalculated by underclass Americans en masse. A “protecting” mentality took root, not only among those who needed protection, but also among the better-off individuals who saw “protection” of the poor as a way to neutralize the more radical voices among them.

My fellow scholars:

I greet you at a special moment in the history of Avicenna University. This year marks the centennial of the founding of this educational institution in 2020. With you, members of the class of 2120, I feel the excitement of releasing you into the world, to share with it the marvelous gifts you have shared with us during these past six years.

As I was preparing the remarks I will be making today, I thought you might appreciate hearing a full 15-minute speech, in the style of the times when this university was founded. [Audience laughs lightly.] In those times, it was believed that wisdom came primarily from wise people. Everyone wanted to be considered wise; therefore, everyone had a great deal to say.

It seemed absurd, at the time, to imagine that one of the 22nd century’s leading centers of education would arise here in the blue grass of the district – what was then the state – of Kentucky. Places like this were backwaters, as people called them then: they were places where the water just sat, rather than rushing rapidly to somewhere or other. Backwaters were thought to be places where not much was happening – where wise people did not tend to congregate, and where, therefore, wisdom was believed to be in short supply. Water was not supposed to just sit around and do nothing. [At the mention of water, the audience grows very quiet.]

We know, now, where that leads. Funny, how the imagery changes when circumstances change. We are now more inclined to realize that, when water rushes off to some other place, you can’t keep it and use it. It’s gone. Backwater stays put, and remains available for those who need it.

The 20th century’s frothy centers of intellectual ferment brought strange fire to the hands of people bent upon misusing it. The yeast fermented uncontrollably. Finally, the batch blew up. The so-called Islamic Manhattan Project returned the strange fire of nuclear power to its birthplace, sending an exceedingly urgent message to political and intellectual leaders worldwide. Suddenly, froth was not so appealing; suddenly listening, reading, and thinking became as valuable and esteemed as speaking, writing, and teaching had been.

And so the way was prepared for the world’s discovery and embrace of Islam, enduring philosophy of the desert. The way was prepared, that is, for the interminable cycle of reflective life in which all (and university faculty most of all) are humbled before the vastness of that which they do not know. In the Judeo-Islamic backlash that followed the devastation of New York City, our thousand-year-old heritage was rediscovered. True Islam – the Islam of Avicenna, Averroes, and others of their era; of humble, openhearted, and exceedingly kind thought – reemerged.

Thus, this proud university came into existence. Here, you have found a haven from the harried practicality of everyday life, from the day-to-day struggles of those who must rely upon common sense in order to survive. I have satisfied myself, from extensive conversation with each of you, that you are well aware of the extraordinary privilege to which you have been entitled, during these years of reading and contemplating classical works in their original languages. You have acquired an education, in the very deepest and most consequential sense of the word.

You are now prepared, beyond any likelihood of temptation into practical affairs, to labor in good and anonymous pursuits, providing unpatented and virtually uncorrupted insights to political leaders and other decisionmakers whose entanglements would otherwise prevent them from achieving depth of insight or clarity of purpose. You cannot cure the desperate internal deficits that compel those unfortunate souls to seek approval in the eyes of thousands of onlookers; but, like generations of Avicenna graduates before you, you can - and you will - help those decisionmakers utilize the fruits of reflective wisdom at a level they would otherwise be unlikely to attain, within the still-benighted world in which they must function.

Avicenna, the scholar, helped to preserve the knowledge upon which Europe would later depend, during those dark centuries before Europe was prepared to use that knowledge. Avicenna, the university, likewise came into existence in a period that spanned many dark centuries, when an obsession with material goods and individual survival had left the bulk of humanity increasingly incapable of experiencing deep satisfaction and peace within themselves, with others, and with nature. In place of an individualistic, competitive divisiveness that had turned people against their neighbors and their planet, Avicenna University offered a path forward, one that will work sustainably for all of humanity, forever.

[Dean Silverstein lifts her hands. Members of the graduating class rise.]

This, then, is your fate, dear students. I welcome you to your futures. I bless your endeavors. I thank you, as my colleagues, for blessing us with your presence.

Let us now enjoy some refreshments and return to our work. But first, please allow me to append a short comment about this unusual little speech I have given.

I realize I have said many things here. These are things to which you, the graduating members of the class of 2020, have already been exposed. It will not be difficult for you to ponder and process my words, lengthy though they have been. But I do want to express my concern on behalf of those parents, family members, and other members of the audience who have not been so fully exposed to such subjects, whose daily meditations may thus be disturbed, for some time to come, by the thoughts I have expressed. Had this not been such an important milestone in the history of this institution, I would not have made such a speech. In the consensus of the faculty of the university, however, these are thoughts of such importance as to merit inclusion in your reflections. May they serve you well.

One of the most firmly held beliefs of the 20th century, in the United States, was that slavery had been largely eradicated following the First Civil War (CW I). This belief was possible primarily because, at that time, slavery was defined in terms of chattel ownership of one person by another. The ascendant view, throughout much of the 200-year period beginning in 1865, was that ending slavery was a convenient matter of forbidding the legally authorized ownership of persons.

That view survived as long as it did because this was an era of extraordinary cognitive disconnection, wrought primarily by excessive tolerance and sheer public fatigue. In other words, people were essentially trained to look at a situation and conceptualize it in terms other than what it obviously was.

The fatigue factor was simply that people were too tired and overwhelmed by the constant barrage of news, advertising, decision, stress, obligation, and the other trappings of consumerist society. They did not have time or stamina to sort things out and understand them. So when they looked at ongoing slavery, they lacked sufficient energy, training, or inclination to perceive it as such.

There were also, as always, some risks in any act of questioning the dominant viewpoint, in those areas where such questioning was societally verboten. People were free to wear, say, and think all kinds of things; but they were not really very free to question what the First Civil War had actually achieved, much less to ask whether another such war might be necessary to consummate the truly free society that abolitionists of the mid-19th century had envisioned.

The tolerance factor had to do with the core democratic flaw through which tired, uninformed, and easily manipulated voters could be persuaded to grant enormous power to madmen and fools. There was a remarkable faith in the wisdom of the people. Voters in Germany had elected Adolf Hitler in 1933, despite indicia of his intolerant views. And yet, after the experience of years of extremely costly war against Hitler, American voters reserved the right to do much the same with a series of extremist presidents in the late 20th and early 21st century. As in Germany, those presidents did not seem extreme when they were being elected; voters in all such instances were pretty confident, time after time, that they were finally getting it right. Only with the post-Depression generation of the 2020s was there, at last, sufficient public humility to obtain ratification of the 30th Amendment and imposition of basic knowledge requirements for those who would vote in national elections.

Because of these fatigue and tolerance factors, people of the slavery centuries possessed a highly developed ability to misconstrue a situation despite overwhelming evidence. As we now know about consumerist democracies, members of the public were typically functioning in a satiated mode of near somnolence, lulled almost to sleep by their comforts, at a time when alertness might have served them better. People simply did not see slavery as a continuing phenomenon, much less a growing one.

Slavery was only beginning to develop during the first century after CW I. The banning of chattel slavery meant that those who wished to own persons would have to do so in more carefully camouflaged ways. Black people were released from their plantations only to endure more than a century of struggle for equality with whites; and even then, their equality was often de jure rather than de facto.

Of course, blacks remained only a small minority of the population, and aggressive enslavement efforts were meanwhile underway elsewhere. For purposes of facilitating a highly affordable middle-class lifestyle, corporations enlisted desperate developing-nation workers (whether located on U.S. soil or abroad) in wage-slave conditions that were often worse than those that chattel slaves had experienced. The plantation slaveowner had a financial investment in his/her slaves, and would lose money if a slave became weaker or died. The wage slaveowner, by contrast, could exhaust the labor of the wage worker with little if any maintenance and upkeep expense, and (except where forbidden by relatively scarce effective union contracts) could simply discard the worker when s/he proved unprofitable.

The U.S. was thus able to exploit its predominant position in the world for more than a generation following World War II, so as to provide an unprecedentedly luxurious life to its middle-class citizens (primarily at the expense of those persons, American and not, who were least able to protect themselves); but in the late 20th century that American position of global supremacy began to fade. Working conditions for whites had been relatively tolerable, though still highly exploitative and oppressive, for nearly three postwar decades; but by the mid-1970s they were beginning to revert to their less tolerable prewar form, albeit in service rather than manufacturing industries. In this sense, blacks finally did achieve large-scale admission into the middle class, only to find that the middle class was ceasing to be what it had once been.

Facing overwhelming fiscal difficulties, reformist administrations of the early 21st century found themselves increasingly unable to help their constituents meet basic needs for security, education, food, shelter, urban infrastructure, and old-age assistance. Slowly, research began to demonstrate that consumerist democracy was delivering a lifestyle inferior to that which American farmers had enjoyed a century earlier – and, of course, vastly inferior to that which tenants had enjoyed under the manorial form of societal arrangement employed in Europe in the 12th century.

Such findings eventually contributed, not only to the passage of the 30th Amendment, but also to the formation of the Freedom Party, with its insistence that people enjoy greater peace, freedom from worry, quality of interpersonal relationships, and liberty of action and self-expression in small, insular communities under the protection of an appropriately trained and competitively selected liege lord.

Decades would pass before the Freedom Party moved out of fringe status and finally achieved power. Once the issue had been brought to public consciousness, however, those decades of recurrent tragedy and trauma served to underscore the plausibility of the Freedom Party platform. The first elected Freedom Party candidate for national office was Senator Perot of Oregon in 2024, but it would be nearly three more decades before the party was finally able to gain control of Congress and begin to dismantle the American slave legacy.

The Automotive Age lingered until about 2040 in America, and even longer in other poor countries. Historians generally agree that the era drew to a close, in the U.S., after the passage of the Rail Transportation Affordability Act (RTAA) of 2037. Until then, annual mass transit passes had been relatively unaffordable, to the point that considerable numbers of ordinary people still had to rely on old individual means of transportation (IMOT) devices.

The RTAA was quite unusual for its time. It was, in essence, a throwback to 20th century concepts of federal government expenditure, of a type that international creditors had largely forced the U.S. to abandon after its “secret” insolvency of 2017. Specifically, federal funding for citizens’ purchases of mass transit passes was facilitated, through the Act, on the basis of an open-ended governmental commitment to make up the difference between what people could afford to pay and current market prices for transit passes.

Creditors allowed Congress to proceed with the Act primarily because, by 2037, the productive capacity of the United States had become competitively undervalued. Continued progress in neural implants, combined with recent liberalization in restrictive freedom-based jurisprudence, held the promise that Americans would soon be offering considerably enhanced productive cognitive and emotive resources to employers. At the same time, further developments in longevity and old-age productivity had justified two substantial increases in individuals’ permanent indebtedness ceilings within the past three years – in 2034 and again in 2036. It appeared, in short, that creditors’ fiscal leap of faith, grounded in solid anticipation of improved returns per person, would ultimately prove justified. Increased access to elevated rail transportation, it was believed, would enable American workers to provide sharply improved levels of profitability for their owners’ benefit.

The RTAA thus fostered a decisive resolution of the long competition between elevated rail transportation providers and IMOT manufacturers. Basically, by 2037, the war was over. IMOTs had been increasingly untenable since the Pavement Desuetude movement of the early 2020s. When the RTAA became law, it was quite clear that the nation and the world would not generally be going back to the land-intensive, agribusiness-disruptive, difficult-to-maintain world of pavement-based IMOT transit. Many vehicle-width roads and bridges, which IMOTs had required since the dawn of the Automotive Age, had already fallen into disrepair when the Desuetude movement began. Motorized IMOTs also suffered the drawbacks of having always been quite dangerous, and of relying upon varying forms of fuels that had become unaffordable, irregularly available, and/or environmentally unacceptable.

Yet several factors delayed the end of the Automotive Age. First, a sharp public and legislative reaction against oversized vehicles, beginning about 2010, set the stage for many years of small-IMOT transit, during which the rising costs of raw materials needed for vehicle construction were partially offset by the smaller quantities of such materials needed per vehicle, as well as by savings in fuel and road construction and maintenance expenses. Possession of an oversized (one-ton or larger) vehicle was not criminalized in most states until about 2021, and of course it was never criminalized for commercial vehicles; but by then numerous judicial decisions had upheld state laws imposing strict civil liability for operation of personal oversized vehicles in vehicular accidents. Because the nation held a substantial inventory of smaller vehicles in 2020, for which their owners had incurred considerable debts and which were then starting to be seen as unsalable, the transition to rail travel was slower than the proponents of rail had hoped. Only as those vehicles and their roads began to fall apart did elevated rail emerge as the unavoidable successor.

It also took many years for the elevated rail network and related features (e.g., various forms of people-movers and automated delivery systems) to develop, following the completion of America’s first citywide prototype in Minneapolis in 2019. It would be another 12 years before national transit passes would finally provide the primary means of transportation for the majority of Americans.

Automobiles and roads, as they had been known in the 20th century, had changed almost beyond recognition by 2030. The change was less dramatic but still profound for trucks, tractors, and other forms of service and commercial vehicles. Even as late as 2040, there were still a few pockets of industry and personal use in which non-rail transportation predominated. For the generation reaching adulthood in 2020 and thereafter, however, automobiles seemed increasingly irrelevant and impractical. There really was never any question that that generation’s children would rely upon rail transit. It may have been this attitudinal change, more even than the several practical considerations just discussed, that spelled the ultimate end of the Automotive Age in the United States.

The United States retained its predominant role in the world for a period of about one complete lifetime — that is, from about 1945 to about 2015.  Many of the things for which its people prided itself were cultural in nature.

Examples include innovative forms of music and literature.  The general themes of isolation, distrust, confusion, and loneliness characteristic of much American culture appeared in, for instance, an often inward-looking musical preoccupation with failed romantic relationships.  Those themes were also evident in a concept of lodging in which each family would live alone, separated from its neighbors in sometimes extreme ways (e.g., locked doors, barricades, and even the use of deadly force against intruders).  As a third example, those isolationist cultural themes manifested themselves in American concepts of “government” and “economics,” both of which referred to various aspects of a uniquely confused and wasteful (albeit well-intended) approach to social steering.

Although these sorts of cultural achievements seem idiosyncratic and terrible to us now, they did address felt needs experienced by people living in that country at that time.  As such, they are best understood and appreciated for the elements of rationality that did exist in them, under the circumstances in which they came about.  Nonetheless, among the many ways in which the U.S. influenced the world, it seems clear at this point that the most important one was its spread of the English language throughout the world.

That language originated, of course, in England.  As such, it was not a unique American invention, and was not necessarily the first thing in which a typical American of the period might have taken pride.  Americans were much more likely to talk about their political ideals, many of which drew upon concepts of freedom compatible with the isolation and extreme individuality just mentioned.

An American of the 20th century would tend to consider those American ideals eternal and valuable to all.  Such a person would not ordinarily admit that the various “rights” (i.e., freedoms) were fluctuating, negotiated, contingent, potentially dangerous, or anything of the sort.  This American stance often alienated people from other cultures, who did not or would not embrace American hyperindividualism and therefore did not place the same premium upon the American “rights.”
Thus, while the ideals certainly were thought-provoking and influential, they were not ultimately very enduring or useful across cultures.  In any case, the ideals tended to be based upon the work of European (especially English) thinkers.  Thus, it was the language that America took throughout the world, that facilitated American power, and that proved to be that society’s most enduring contribution to global peace and prosperity.