[Update: Oh shit. Joe was talking about the Wilson Quarterly article "Wittgenstein's curse", not Lukacs' article. And he's spot-on about it. The author also falls victim to other fallacies cited here. Finding which ones is left as an exercise for the reader. This reminds me of the time I built a wooden implement, carefully measuring and gluing everything, then discovered it was the mirror image of what I needed.]
Joe calls it telescopic fallacy (and illuminates the concept nicely). Robert Fulford called it Geezer Talk (the pointer is still there at A&L Daily, but the link is dead). Joe thinks John Lukacs has a small case of it. Lukacs himself refers to his essay (seemingly self-deprecatingly) as a Jeremiad and offers counter-Jeremiad examples, so the case is indeed mild and treatable. (BTW, a search for "telescopic fallacy" turns up this page, first-glance worthwhile reading regarding fallacies of historical argument, which appropriates Joe's term for another use.)
Maybe there's another discount we can apply: is Lukacs' stated perception -- of being at the end of an era -- simply one that commonly comes with age? It's understandable enough that at acertain age, as one starts seeing one's life mostly in retrospect, one could want to close the book on something much larger too, especially if you've felt particularly identified with a time that you see fading. (On the other hand I've known several seniors who, though they're satisfied with the fullness of their lives, wish they could hang around longer just because there are so many exciting things on the horizon.)
But Lukacs' conclusion goes beyond that to a point we see frequently now: Francis Fukayama (the End of History chap) is now talking about the necessity for oversight in genetic research, Robert Wright sums up Nonzero with a caution about the critical time we live in, suggesting just a wee bit of slowing down, and of course Bill Joy is dour about nanotech. The common thread, which Lukacs also pulls out at the end, is that we're unthinkingly propelling and propelled by our science, and we rarely question where it's taking us -- an attitude we could label as conservative, in the strict sense of questioning change.
One place Lukacs overshoots the benefit of simplification, IMO, is in his closing statement about the great division forming in the U.S. The "there are two kinds of people in the world" device is perhaps another overused attention-getter (another recent use was a cover story in the Atlantic Monthly, where David Brooks writes of the two Americas -- the coastal big-city dwellers and everyone else). I think Lukacs' motive there, however is to open the conversation beyond the existing label-sticking by looking for a couple more. But getting stuck in label-sticking isn't useful.
In any case, I found Lukacs' sweeping historical generalizations to be a good temporary scaffolding from which to get a more detailed perspective.
May 02, 2002 10:28 PM