The world is moving so fast, that we have few true experts on tomorrow. All we have are experts on yesterday. Gyan Nagpal
Great magic asks that you trouble the waters. It requires a disruption, something new. Leigh Bardugo
The changes that are required are fundamental changes in the way we are living. Wendell Berry
The time is now proper for us to reform backward; more by dissenting than by agreeing; by differing more than by consent. Michel de Montaigne
Reforming ignorantly will consequence crisis and destruction. Kamaran Ihsan Salih
I don’t want to do away with corporations. I want them to make our cars, but not our laws. Doris Haddock
As I need to remind readers from time to time, especially those from the US, this space is only rarely devoted to an assessment of the US government and its performance, except insofar as that performance jeopardizes the multilateral space where we make our daily claim and only under the most unusual circumstances. There are hundreds of commentators of all political stripes, many seeming to incarnate that old saying of “the blind leading the blind,” that can scratch the itch of partisan critique.
This scratching is generally not for us. But this week, the unusual became the absurd. This is the week where deferred threats and pent up grievances dominated our news feed and showed my country, for all its bravado in spaces such as the UN Security Council, to be too-concerned with expanding the already bloated self-importance of a hyper-partisan leadership even if that means dishonoring our agreements, undermining our obligations, and stoking division among persons with grievances far more legitimate and longstanding than the plutocrats whose laments now dominate the airwaves.
Surely there are people smarter and better equipped than me to draw threads that connect the disruptions of the week – from calling the police on a New York City bird watcher to pulling the US out of yet another UN agency; in this instance the World Health Organization which has done much to alleviate suffering from diseases that have long had a stranglehold on global populations, especially in communities already wracked by poverty and environmental degradation. In this instance, it seems clear what the end game is – pin the COVID blame on an agency that, while not entirely above the political and multilateral fray, is not at all responsible for the failure of my government at the highest levels to heed the warnings of its experts and prepare the public to respond to a virus for which, in very real terms, delay is death.
And then there is the violence in Minneapolis which has spread to many US cities (and even some abroad), violence which is shocking only to people who are not paying attention to who we are now as a nation, not who we imagine ourselves to be. The sometimes-regrettable levels of disruption (including some clearly stoked by “outsiders”) that have followed in the wake of the George Floyd murder have spoken volumes of the psychic distress that all of us have been placed under – pandemic-fueled isolation coupled with economic distress for millions and a plenary indulgence for all manner of ethnic-based violence, racial intolerance, vile conspiracies and partisanship with few voices, left or right, willing to speak truth “to their own.”
This erstwhile “exceptional” nation is now thus only to the degree that we feel entitled to set the rules and then not play by them, to alternately engage and withdraw attention only when it suits our purposes, to abandon leadership where it might contribute to the common good and undermine the contributions of others to that common end.
We’re simply a mess now; at each other’s throats, stressed beyond tolerance, fearful for our children’s future, canceling each other out as though this is all little more than a video game. And while we piously proclaim, yet again, how violence against property will not help solve our racial and ethnic divisions, that piety does not extend to our copious structural violence nor reaches out in remorse to people of color – including the diverse nurses and doctors trying to rescue us from COVID – who have seen only regression and backlash with progress habitually over-promised and under-delivered.
It is hard, indeed, to be an “expert” in either present or future, to figure out who we are and where we are headed, to find that clear vision of what we truly represent, what we really care about, what our current levels of anxiety and dissonance communicate about our potential for justice and healing. But this week I recalled a graduate school seminar based in part around a remarkable book, “The Age of Reform” by Columbia’s Richard Hofstadter. Yes, it is US focused, yes, it is pre-enlightenment regarding its use of uni-gendered language, and yes it is scant on exploring the vantage points of women, indigenous peoples and others. But it is also a remarkably wise and well-researched tale assessing the complexities of our own past, the degree to which reforms in this country were largely the product of flawed individuals who were often getting in their own way and who were only episodically the people they thought they were.
In most of the period, as Hofstadter puts it, from William Jennings Bryan to Franklin Delano Roosevelt, reforms were largely in the hands of two broad and often-diverse movements – populism and progressivism – each with contributions to make to cultural and legislative reforms and each contributing in their own way to the divisions they ostensibly sought to erase. Like in our own time, these reformers encountered a society that was racing ahead at unprecedented speeds, consolidating political and fiscal power along the way and creating inequalities that disrespected traditional patterns of rural life. Such patterns were then being controlled from cities like puppets, puppeteers who essentially saw workers as disposable cogs in the creation of vast fortunes that built the railroads and then gobbled up every bit of usable land for miles along the tracks.
The responses to the speed and greed which characterized much of the late 19th and early 20th century took forms that now resonate unhappily with our own experience. As described by Hofstadter these included scorn towards Europe and Europeans (the source of most immigrants of that time), “racial, religious and nativist phobias,” resentment of big business and the smug elitism of east coast urban areas, as well as of trade-unions and the intellectuals who often looked down on them. There were riots in these times and many repressive responses. A flurry of ideologically-driven publications seemed to “choose hatred as a kind of creed.” There were periods of considerable economic distress as well as contradictory motions – dipping our toes in the waters of multilateralism while most of the rest of our body preferred isolation. Conspiracy theories, then as now, were both abundant and toxic. Distrust of government and other “big” institutions was rampant and (as with so much else in our culture) largely unexamined.
And lest we forget, the progressives of that time shared many populist contradictions, to which one could add a patch of sentimentality regarding the capacity of people for moral reform and a bit of unconfessed complacency (much like our current era) regarding the full, ominous, destructive consequences of the economic havoc unleashed by “captains of industry.” Indeed, while progressives of that time retained the welcome interest in reforming themselves along with the world, there was also a sense (much like our own time) that many also increasingly represented a professional class closer to the interests of those they critiqued than the interests of those they ostensibly represented.
This is a bit longer than usual and I recognize that most of you weren’t counting on a book report. But it is instructive in this time of grave division and high anxiety to recognize the degree to which we have failed, over and again, to fully overcome the foibles of our now-distant past. Collectively, we have not dismantled our petty discrimination and hatred, our stereotyping and conspiratorial thinking. We have not insisted on the fairness and equity that ostensibly lie at the heart of our national creed. We have held too tightly to our distrust of so much that is of foreign origin or governance-related, or of anything that is changing at speeds too rapid to fathom. We in our elite havens have endorsed the “rules” for the political, social and economic order and then disregarded those rules when it suits our convenience. We pass laws relevant to the contexts of lawmakers and their ilk but without concern for how their implications will play out in the many places that lie beyond the concerns of our large urban centers and their mighty institutions.
The stubborn complacency characteristic of our own time has been shocked again this week into anxiety and anger by senseless brutality, reckless governance, an invisible virus, widespread economic uncertainty and a nativism that has long defined a part of our national character and which has now been given some semblance of official permission, as was the case over a century ago, to stereotype and humiliate, to denigrate and intimidate, and much of this at the point of a gun.
Clearly our waters are quite “troubled” now, and it might well be the case that they will need to “trouble” further if we are to heal current social divisions, honor promises rendered within and beyond national borders, institutionalize more of the courage and compassion of those who keep our pragmatic ideals afloat, make the “magic” that we are still capable of making, and become in fact the people that we so uncritically and enthusiastically profess to be.
We owe as much to those who endured our legacies of violence, greed and discrimination, but also to a future with its own complexities to manage, one that can certainly do without many of the obstacles which we continue to erect in our own path.
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