An email exchange has reminded me that much of today’s news seems to be saying something about the limits of power. Tim Burke has a good piece about this on his blog today, entitled “The Gods that Underachieved.”

The peculiarity of our time is that people all around the planet know that the high modernist state failed to live up to its promises of the perfected management of human societies through technocracy. Those who live in democratic societies know that their progress towards being fairer, more just or more open is at best stalled. Those who live in authoritarian societies must increasingly wonder at whether change can ever come, as the one area where the capacity of the contemporary nation-state continues to show improvement is its ability to mobilize violence against its own citizens and to manage their dissent.

Tim compares the modern technocratic state to a phantom limb. We know it’s gone, but we keep expecting it to be there and to serve our needs. Unscrupulous politicians manipulate our expectations by demanding results they know are impossible in a crisis and blaming the crisis on alleged inaction that would have produced those results, all the while claiming they themselves would have resolved the crisis had it been their job to do so and charging the state with government overreach however it acts. One can read the outlines of this analysis in the orchestrated Republican arguments about the Gulf Coast oil spill, the current and continuing financial crisis, and the Arizona immigration furor, to name a few sites of contention.

I’ve been thinking with respect to the oil spill and the financial crisis that we may be up against a twenty-first century phenomenon. If the technocratic state failed us in the last century, this century seems to be unfolding as a time when our knowledge will fail us. Of course, if knowledge is power, as the truism has held at least since Bacon, we may be in the second phase of the emptying out of our age’s popular faith in technology. But it’s frightening to think that we don’t know the extent of the Gulf Coast oil spill or whether we possess technology adequate to cope with it. And it’s even more frightening to think that we don’t know the extent of the present financial crisis worldwide, or whether we understand how to deal with it, let alone fix it.