history

Nationalism is Not Fascism

While some things follow a disturbing parallel to the rise of the German National Socialists in the 1930s, I don’t think fascism or Nazi are quite the right labels. First, it’s been diluted to the point of uselessness. The ‘fascist’ HOA doesn’t like the rose bush I planted. The fascist coffee shop won’t give me a plastic straw. The Nazis on the county board made my grocery store charge me $0.05 per plastic bag. And so on. The problem is that the better labels are less sexy. They’re less evocative of righteous resistance.

Let’s start with nationalism, not as the most troubling aspect, but because it’s actually the least problematic label, and also falling to irrelevancy. During the Olympics, all the people who never follow any of the sports are suddenly cheering for their national team. Send someone abroad and they are almost guaranteed to chafe at some local law, regulation, or custom almost all in the host country find more than reasonable.

Most people forget that 200 years ago, there was no Italy (1861) and there was no Germany (1870). When the Italian fascists came to power, it was about 60 years after Italian unification. And the same for Germany. It was a sense of national self, stewing in the 1800s, that made those nationals possible. By contrast the French nation came to be in the 17th century. And prior to that most people saw themselves as Burgundian or Provencal and not French, except by language. And we are currently seeing resurgence of Welsh and Scottish nationalism in the UK, that seemed to be waning during the end of the 20th century, as the a series of governments seem to continuously stumble.

There are various reasons the nation state came to exist. One is industrialization. Having broader national boundaries provides economic and developmental benefits. It’s hard to run a rail road between two major cities if it is subject to the regulations of a series of principalities. Defense against invasion, trade regulation, and social services like education (which were entering the remit of governments) would be easier at a broader, national level. A love of being French, Italian, German, or British, even if you had a different dialect and diet from other parts of the nation, was a necessary ingredient to building the modern nation state.

Nationalism in itself is not an evil. Americans are right to admire things about their country, such as the entrepreneurial spirit, independence, belief in fundamental equality, and the idea that legitimacy comes from the people, not the church or a blood line. Where nationalism sours is in its utility as a trowel to shape an enemy. The golem could be in the form of immigrants, it could be racial, rumored foreign influence, or even the insufficiently nationalistic. It’s one thing to cheer your team at the World Cup, and it’s another round people up in mass arrests. Almost always this enemy isn’t an actual enemy, but just different and weak enough to attack with impunity. For this reason, we need to be aware of the dark and violent ends to which nationalism may be employed. Appeals to nationalism are a warning sign of dark motives.

Does that mean we rid ourselves of nationalism? An absence of nationalism is like an absence of ego. Someone completely without ego is kind of non-functional. And while the death of the self is a goal of meditation, you won’t last long in any society if you aren’t willing to assert your own needs and desires. Would you just let anyone cut in line in front of you, because you aren’t any more special than anyone else (including your beliefs about fairness and queuing)? Maybe hope that someone else would stick up for you? A nation with no nationalism, no sense of self, no belief in their distinctiveness, or that they contribute, won’t be a nation for long. Would you let the Russians just take over because you don’t believe your nation brings anything worth preserving to the world stage?

And while I don’t believe faceless bureaucrats in Brussels see the eradication of all nationalism as their goal, it does sometimes feel that way. That you could live in one Ikea decorated apartment in a major city, existing on a diet of kabobs, Thai, and curry, and move to another city’s Ikea decorated apartment with the same cuisines, without noticing you are in a new country, appears to be their ideal. Over time a national identity can expand in smaller and larger ways. It’s hard to imagine Germany without the Donner sandwich. In the span of a person’s life, the change may need to be moderated. Take the German who says they only like spicy, foreign food out of Germany for a year and they’ll be eating Spätzel the day after their flight lands. I was abroad for a year and developed a craving for KFC. I normally go years without eating KFC.

Like most normal people with a sense of self, most people have a sense of their national identity. Maybe they aren’t educated on all the fine points and interpretations of their nations’ sordid pasts, but come unification day, liberation day, constitution day or whatever, they wave a flag and happily watch a parade. They are proud of their distinctive contributions their scientists, poets, composers, philosophers, artists, or explorers made to shape the world. Even if the rest of the world doesn’t also acknowledge that contribution. They are part of that national self and often believe, in some small part, they contribute to a nation’s goodness. It is a part (to a lesser or greater degree) of who they are.

If you try to take that away, there are many who will react badly. You are denying them a sense of themselves. When you attack someone’s self, who they are, they will almost always take it as a deep, personal attack. An attack on their own existence, or right to exist. When we criticize any sense of empathy with “nationalist” claims because of where those ideas could lead, we forget maybe a majority of the country shares parts of that empathy. They can remember where they used to get decent fish and chips and it’s now a cell phone repair store. It’s next to the other cell phone repair store that used to sell pies. (Food, especially, is tied to national identity and a sense of self). No one seems to ever go in and out of those shops, except the young men loitering there all day. And while they also find the skinheads at protests revolting, they also see neighbors that share their concerns. While they aren’t passionate enough about pies and chips to march, they do understand the loss of part of their own identity.

One way to look at why fascism and not communism came to power in Germany after World War I is that Communism was internationalist. This is also why it made sense in Russia, a multi-ethnic empire. Germans were happy to feel German pride, as that was the path to unification. Italians were happy to feel Italian pride, and their basis for unification. While some of the fascist and Nazi leaders got their start in workers movements or self-declared soviets, they were never part of an international brotherhood of the proletariat. They were the German proletariat and the Italian proletariat. They felt betrayed by the forces of commerce and capitalism that put money, lucre, ahead of the Italian and German national interests. The takeover of industry by the state, to bend it to the needs of the international proletariat, is abstract. To make the economy and society more fair to Germans and Italians is more concrete.

This is the landscape we inhabit. A left that wants to actively minimize national distinction. This is not new and has been a feature of the far left from before World War I. A far right that is capitalizing on the push back as policies on immigration bring in new cultures. This is not new and has been a feature of the far right since before World War I. The closing of a German Christmas market is seen by one side as a sign of enlightenment by giving others a break from cultural imperialism, and by the other as evidence the national character (and by extension the individual’s self) is being killed. The sad truth is the vendors made so little money it was hardly worth the effort. But the “left infected” main stream press minimizes it, while the “far right” protesters over state it. And neither bothered shopping at the market.

And just like railroads were the kind of problem that made a nation more attractive than a string of independent duchies, more problems are regional. Easy commerce between Rotterdam and Prague means drugs, guns, and trafficked people can move easily between those same cities. Dutch police have to work with German police and German police have to work with Czech police. Your country could be picked off by the Russians, or you can create a defense pact with other countries. You could depend on your own electrical generation, or you can tie to a larger grid with better economies of scale. And so on. This does mean ceding local sovereignty to regional bodies, with the EU probably being ahead of the game. And this does mean you need to see yourself as part of a larger whole and not just German, Czech or Dutch.

As Europe ages, its relatively high wages will attract people to live and work there, providing much needed labor. The answer would be for Europeans to make more Europeans, but they seem to be unable to bring birth rates to anywhere near replacement rates. At this rate their adult populations will need to spend an inordinate percentage of their work-force on caring for the large, elderly populations. Without workers from Eastern Europe, the Middle East, Asia, and Africa, the demographics for Western Europe are not in line with much economic growth. And while some come to Europe for political freedom denied to them in their homelands, others are just coming to work. They are also from societies where membership is tribal and by blood. They don’t expect to become German, French, or Italian any more than they expect to grow wings. They want their local food, local dress, and local habits. Of course this means displacing some of their host country’s food and habits in the process to create these enclaves.

While Europe is the place where these changes are most easily seen, the trends are present in highly developed parts of North America and in Asia. The native birth rate in the US is not as bad as most in Europe, but below replacement. And the Koreans and Japanese wish their birth rates were as high as Europe’s. And the reaction in America and Asia to immigration being now worse than Europe’s. With the United States engaging in a virtual pogrom and the continued, quiet racism of Japan and Korea preferring robots over non-Koreans and non-Japanese. Even in the developed parts of China and India, the birth rates are dropping well below replacement. And the same needs for regional cooperation and governance are precipitating a shared notion of defense amongst historical enemies in Asia, while the US is choosing the path of least cooperation.

Center-left politicians have been failing and threading the needle on nationalism and have elected to throw a lot of baby out with the bath water. They have bent over backwards to make themselves bland and European, or bland an American, to not antagonize the ethnic minorities residing in their countries, and to avoid the horrific excesses of their recent past. They apologize profusely, taking part in cringe-inducing rituals such as land acknowledgements. They have ceded the ground on nationalism to the right. With nationalism itself considered the providence of those with terrible ideas about race and tolerance. And as more “regular” people see more change, more foreign enclaves, more cringey prostrations, that attack their sense of self, the more fertile ground the right has found.

I’m receptive to taking an unflinching eye to one’s past, but a portion of the left wants to reduce any historical accomplishment to just ‘theft.’ And that the US and Europe especially should have nothing to say on the matter. But if we apply the same logic to the past, there is almost no region that hasn’t, at some point, waged near genocidal war on another. Whether it’s the mongol invaders, the Huns, the Egyptians, Muslim armies across parts of North Africa and Europe, or even the Africans who migrated into Europe, displacing the Neanderthals. We are now reconstructing the rich spiritual tradition those Neanderthal tribes might have had. They were displaced by new arrivals from a foreign land, and made extinct. And while not Homo Sapiens-Sapiens, the Neanderthals were close enough to breed with the new arrivals. The difference with the present is we have pictures, documentation, and detailed stories. While all we have from the past are the barest of records and trinkets dug from the ground.

What should those politicians do, going forward? How do we stop this slide to an authoritarian right that seems to be infecting Asian, American, and European politics? At the very least, your desire for a better life (as problems and opportunities are more likely regional than just national) depends on constructing a solution to this problem. The first is losing the seemingly visceral reaction against nationalism. It’s important to understand you are proud and happy to be of your nation. And not follow that sentence with a ‘but’ to elaborate or qualify what you mean. Quite a few successful politicians on the left already do this but not emphatically enough. Second, you have to define a vision of nationalism that is conducive to a better future. For America, that nationalism should be based on ideas in the constitution and declaration of independence. They’re good ideas. They just need to be implemented more broadly.

Third, there needs to be a frank conversation on immigration. It can’t be ‘this is what you need to accept, otherwise you are a bigot.’ It must be about a future as Germans, Italians, or Americans, and how that future involves new citizens. That immigration is part of the story of economic growth. But growth as a stronger Italy, Germany, America, etc. It should never be along the lines of we need to become a more diverse, more multi-ethnic, and therefore must sacrifice our national identity to make room for other identities.

And that conversation can’t just be with the native population. It must be with the immigrant population as well. Parts of Europe are already starting this process, by making sure that (men especially) understand that women are truly free. Not covered up to be free from being ogled by men, but free to dress as they chose, be with whom they chose, and become educated as they choose. And that immigrants will send their children to non-segregated schools to learn the local language, local customs, and a reasonable indoctrination as good citizens. Assimilation need not be the eradication of their cultural heritage, but they should understand they need to become good citizens in the host country, not dwellers in alien enclaves. And if they aren’t there to become good citizens, there will be no place for them. Otherwise, in the future, there might not be room for those who actually do want to be good citizens.

Finally, the center left needs to deliver. If the perceived choice is between no change and immigration changing the character of your country, or no change and no immigration, you might choose no immigration. After all, you might still be on a slow, downward slide, but at least you’ll ‘have your country.’ More layers of bureaucracy are not necessarily the solution. More committees to make more reports to be further vetted by other committees to build a single public restroom in a park is not good government. It is bad government. Not addressing the needs of the people because too many layers exist make sure all possible concerns are addressed is terrible government. At some point just do things. Even if imperfect, something accomplished beyond re-paving the same roads legitimizes your power.

Finally, if you still believe nationalism is bad and there’s no good way to court it, I’ll leave you with the example of the Ukrainians. They are countering Russian aggression because of the belief their nation, their national identity, their families, their land, and their freedom to lives as the choose are worth fighting for. It is much cheaper to live as a vassal state to Russia, like Belarus or what Hungary might prefer. It is also easier to just emigrate abroad than live in the shadow of Russian aggression. Yet they continue to resist, paying a price few of us understand, to live as they choose. Nationalism is what is helping to keep them going and to help keep them free.

[One comment was that maybe I meant patriotism instead of nationalism. That’s arguable except that I would argue patriotism can’t exist without a state or cause. Someone could be a German nationalist and have a sense of pride or love for German culture, accomplishments, food, or art in Germany, Austria and Switzerland, but only be a Swiss patriot. French partisans, during World War II, were patriots, allied to the French government in exile. But some French felt they were patriots volunteering for the Charlemange SS Divsion. Even though their patriotic ideals were different, they were both likely French nationalists. Native Americans did their ‘patriotic’ duty, volunteering to serve in the US armed forces, but are probably not American nationalists, in the commonly accepted sense of the term. In fact, America is the example of a country with patriots who also love in addition to the one where they reside and may have served in the armed forces.]

Social Media Is Not the Printing Press

If I read one more op/ed or article where social media is compared to the printing press, I’m going to barf. The latest one is in the NYT, and quotes a number of published important people about the inevitability of all of this. That it’s a fundamental technological change, like the printing press. And who would want the printing press stopped? Sure, it helped fuel hundreds of years of brutal religious wars, but look at where we are today. Mark Zuckerberg is on par with Johannes Gutenberg. We just have to accept the misinformation (also spread by the printing press), libelous material (also spread by the printing press), and the hundreds of years of brutal, bloody, and barbaric religious wars between illiberal regimes to get to something good.

First, let’s get some of the printing press mythology out of the way. Johannes Gutenberg did not invent the printing press. There were presses before Gutenberg, but they were based on techniques such as carving into wood to create images. To publish anything more than pictures with that technology was hard and expensive. Gutenberg’s innovation was to create type from cheap lead and make that type movable (settable) on the page. It was too expensive to make the lettering out of bronze or brass. Lead is plentiful, cheap, and easy to work. If the letters wear down, you melt the lead and stamp more letters using the bronze or brass stamps. It made publishing a book, using a press instead of monks and quills, a commercially viable project.

The internet itself may be the more correct printing press analog. But social media is not. Social media, unlike the invention of movable type, is a creation of law. Prior to the passage of section 230 in 1996, a site like X would have been effectively impossible. Why? Because X would have been held liable for the content of the posts, regardless of the author. Thanks to section 230, X can promote social media posts that libel, slander, threaten, defame, intimidate, or harass individuals with little or no legal exposure. If you want to go after the perpetrator, you have to go after an army of dimwits, hidden behind a degree of anonymity that makes prosecution difficult, if not practically impossible.

Yet many intelligent people confuse this legal loop-hole as a change in fundamental technology. What if the New York Times suddenly started printing non-factual, slanderous content? They would be sued. What if the Washington Post just printed screen shots from the Wall Street Journal as news? They would be sued. What if People magazine suddenly started telling teens that no one likes them and that suicide was a good thing? They would rightfully get sued and maybe criminally investigated. We dealt with this problem long ago with print publishers. It’s not insane to think a place publishing a piece of content or information is liable for that content or information.

But isn’t social media just the stuff regular people post? No, you ignorant fool, it is not. If you believe that lie, you are willfully ignorant of the reality around you. It is a mere fraction of what the rubes and the simpletons post. A large portion is the product of professionals who use features of the platforms to promote ideas. These range from intelligence agencies creating chaos to people trying to sell cosmetics. What you see as the product of ‘just regular folks,’ is a highly curated feed. Imagine a print publication that took submissions from anyone. Then those people vote on the submissions and the print publication goes forward with the issue. Their goal is to aggregate content that gets folks to pick up a copy and look at the ads. They don’t really care what’s in their published material. And the headline is something like ‘Donald Trump has Butt Baby with Satan.’ They would be sued. Because it’s print. If you print it on paper, you are a publisher.

But if you do it on social media, it’s not a problem. X or Facebook can run the exact same headlines. They can promote those same stories for the exact same reason, to push ads (and collect data to better target you in the future). Yet they have a pass. Intelligent people are confused by this, as if there is something inherent in some technology that makes X or Facebook incapable of being stopped. That whatever we do today, we would just wind up with new companies tomorrow. The internet would allow for the passage of information, but it’s the legal structures that have allowed for the creation of these massive, multi-trillion dollar companies that are poisoning democracy with the goal of shoving one more ad in front of your face.

If you took the stance that Facebook is acting as a publisher, with its algorithm to select and promote content, the same way the New York Times acts as a publisher, Facebook would cease. If they could get sued because your grandma re-posted a libelous story, they would not let your Nana do that. And if your rejoinder is that it’s not employees of Facebook that generate the content, well, not all the content in the NYT is a product of its employees. They may pay for Op/Ed pieces, where the person is not a staff writer. Okay, if you don’t pay for it, then it’s user contributed? Social media companies do compensate their “creatives” or “content providers.” X and YouTube, for example, have allowed people to build influence businesses by (in part) direct payments. So the social media companies are paying people for content, selecting which content to show, and collecting money through ad impressions. I really fail to see the legal difference between the NYT and Facebook from a liability perspective, except for the invented shield of section 230.

But revoking section 230 would throw a lot of baby out with the bathwater. What about a small, mom-and-pop site in the American Heartland just hosting Bible verses and some miscreant missuses it for nefarious purposes. You would shut them down? That’s the false choice we are presented. Either continue forward as is, or create legal quagmires on every main street between San Diego and Portland, Maine. We could amend section 230 to put the legal responsibility back on to what are essentially publishers. Or maybe we should amend other laws so genuine mistakes or oversights are not criminalized. We already don’t arrest UPS drivers and executives because they deliver illegal material or contraband. Nor do we throw the bank branch manager in jail because the money in their bank was used for criminal purposes (although they sometimes know – and in that case we do and should).

We act like we can’t possibly learn from the past with a new situation in the present. That we just have to repeat the same problems, over and over again, every time there’s a new change. This is a kind of powerlessness brought on by ignorance. It’s on a computer and it’s done by young, clever people who use words most people don’t understand. And it’s kind of magical, if the typewriter is the last writing instrument whose innards you still understood. Because it’s magic, and the magicians who benefit from it say it has to be this way, then it just has to be this way. Francis Fukuyama may be a genius in his area of expertise, but he bows to technology much the same way your grandma does.

There are other arguments, such as we wouldn’t have such a broad dissemination of information about the sciences, or social, or political events. But we do And with organizations that are subject to standard laws and norms for publishers. The internet drives down the cost of publishing and so opens the ability for smaller publishers to come forward. But they are still publishers. If Scientific American online publishes an article on their site threatening the city manager of Watkins, Illinois, they can be sued. It doesn’t matter if they paid for the article, or it was written by their staff, or it was freely handed to them. They are a publisher and chose to publish it. The same threat on X might go unnoticed as it may not even be in the top 10% of threats against people that day, promoted by the algorithm on X. If I set up a news outlet on the internet, and “publish,” I will be sued for the butt-baby thing. But if I’m “just a platform,” taking submissions from users, then I’m actively shielded. Even if it’s the same butt-babies, poorly veiled death threats, anti-vaccine fabrications and all else.

This collective delusion can’t continue in the context of a vibrant democracy. The more we delude ourselves into believing we are incapable of correcting our own creation, that the things the mind of man hath wrought are as unshakable as the strong nuclear force, and that it is as inevitable as the sun rising, the more we will seem like complete morons to future generations.

I often feel like the one guy point at the naked emperor, parading down the street, and wondering why no one else sees this for what it is. I think other people do. I think they’re afraid that if they do anything about the current situation, then their side gets hurt more. If we take away section 230’s protections, it will be the other side that runs amok. Or it will just be big publishers that squeeze out the little publishers. (As if we don’t already have a handful of social and traditional media companies, all owned by politically minded billionaires). But what if there’s a problem and we need to get our base out to protests? What if the other side comes to rule the information landscape?

So that’s where we are. Ignorance about the thing we created and fear its absence will leave our side worse off. And we have many, many instances in our history where fear and ignorance have ruled us, and maybe that’s the example from which we fail to learn.

Meditations On Infrastructure

I wonder what Charles, son of Pepin the Short, king of the Franks and Lombards, thought as he made his way through Rome to be crowned by Pope Leo. Once a city of over a million souls, Rome had dwindled to between 50,000 and 100,000. Still, Rome was twice as populated as Paris and larger than the (by comparison) hamlets in the Carolingian empire. Most of Rome’s elites and maybe 1 in 7 ancient Romans overall were literate. In Charlemagne’s retinue, only a handful were literate. Almost certainly none of his rank and file soldiers. The great city in the year 800, Constantinople, was roughly half the size Rome was at its peak.

People no longer care for the term “Dark Ages” for the period between the fall of Rome and the more orderly middle to late Medieval period. But it was a step backward. Art, literacy, trade, and culture became smaller, more rare, and simpler. When Rome was briefly re-invaded by the Eastern Roman armies, reestablishing Roman control, it might have seemed that things were on the mend. During those centuries there were good years and bad years. From the summit to the nadir, it would be surprising if people saw the fall of Rome for what it was. I imagine many could not spot the rot from within, and of those who did, some exploited it for their gain, others refused to believe it, and the rest failed to act.

What does this have to do with technology?

Everything.

An empire provides two benefits. The first is trade and the second is communication. Trade allows for greater well-being. You can sell your stuff in more places and you can buy stuff from other places. Your quality of life, including your diet, are much better as goods flow freely through trade networks. Second, is the flow of ideas. You have access to many more thoughts and ways of thinking. Your progress is no longer limited to the smartest person in your village. You have access to the thoughts of the smartest people as far as technological reach allows.

The modern micro-processor the product of vast trade and communication networks. Designers from California, fabricators in Asia, sand from North Carolina, machines from Europe, and tens of thousands of companies. Hundreds of thousands of individuals are necessary to provide you with one modern CPU. Millions more provide the support chips, mother boards, assemblies, designs, and software to make the chip do something useful. The collaboration is possible because of safe networks (ASML can ship a machine to Taiwan without worrying India will steal it on the way), and intellectual goods (you can speed the design of a chip by licensing parts of it from other vendors).

But wait, didn’t the United States make its own chips? Yes, it did. But it wasn’t necessarily cost-effective. When the micro-processor had tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, or even a few million transistors, they were fabricated in Texas, Washington, or California. But modern CPUs are at the very edge of physics, along with the much larger demand. Complexity and demand have made chip fabrication a highly refined and specialized industry. TSMC amortizes the insane costs of making a modern chip over many customers. Intel cannot amortize the cost of producing Intel chips just over Intel customers. Running a fab profitably means running it near capacity. Intel understands it’s competition is TSMC, not AMD. It is unlikely to succeed.

The modern world that produces an EPYC processor with 128 cores for a reasonable number of thousands (or hundreds) dollars may already be collapsing. We won’t know until we have the benefit of a few hundred years of hind-sight. The United States has been the guarantor of safe trade in goods. The US is stepping back from that role, focusing on a more narrow problem of one island in the Pacific. The Island that fabricates most processors. At the same time, the US has erected trade barriers and tariffs, slowing international trade. For the first time in a long time, there is a prospect the free flow of commerce may become less certain. It won’t be sudden. Like the fall of Rome, it will take decades. For example, the start may be increased insurance, or no insurance. But slowly routes will close.

The current administration is also attacking the free flow of information. This includes an assault on the statistics and information provided by the government itself. Data considered “DEI” related has been scrubbed, and the researchers and teams providing that information fired. We see an attempt to control Universities, which are parts of the flow of information. We even have the prospect that government statisticians will be fired if they announce unwelcome information. Information and research provides our modern life (electronics, medicine, arts, and culture), and freely disseminating that information makes us richer. Along with an attack on research, through lawsuits against news outlets, we are seeing private sector organizations self-edit if not self-censor. Over time, quality information will be more rare and more expensive.

But the current administration won’t live forever, right? Even if repudiated in the next series of elections (and putting aside the slim but credible notion of a coup to stay in power), the population supporting that administration is still there. They are cheering as the existing system is ripped apart. The breakdown of foreign trade and stifling information is a feature. For some it is because parochial, xenophobic, or tribal loyalty is more important than even their own well being. For some it is because the current chaos is hurting the parts of society they don’t like. For some, it will because they profit from the chaos. In that chaos they are free to pursue policies that make themselves richer.

After this administration the people who made it possible are not going away. Charlemagne rode into a long-defeated city not because the invading barbarians were superior to Rome in technology, society, economy, or government. Rome rotted from within. Because the rot was too profitable for some, or the cost of fixing the rot to great for others, or they preferred the rot for other reasons. Once it sets in, the rot may be ultimately irreversible. Nothing else I say will make sense unless these ideas are understood: that the fall is largely invisible to those falling; the fall results in a smaller, sicker, more parochial, less developed world; and that some are incentivized to participate in the fall. I’m not altogether sure any more than a handful (if any) of Charlemagne’s subjects understood how much poorer and smaller their world had become. Or that it would be hundreds of years more before real progress returns to Western Europe.