Wednesday, August 14, 2024
I was thinking, nobody believes in Communism anymore, and they don’t believe in Capitalism either, not as saviors. We have moved away from belief in economics and are into new territory. The social war we are engaged in centers on something else, and people don’t quite know what it is, because the categories haven’t clarified yet. Some think the struggle centers on social values, family values, religious values, or maybe the individual v. the state or the individual v. private greed. All these things are somewhat true, but only somewhat.
The mutual incomprehension and intolerance and – therefore – fear and hatred that we see all around us is the kind of thing that accompanies any new from of struggle against the unknown. We’ve seen it all before.
When the medieval age ended, people began fighting about different things, thinking about them in the old categories, until time and experience clarified what was really going on. They thought of the struggle as orthodoxy v. heresy, or freedom of conscience v. coercion of thought, or adherence to the Bible v. idolatry. Those who contended were sincere, but unknown to themselves they were helping bring not a return to old values, but a new world with new values.
Without trying to spell it out, there came capitalism and imperialism, manifesting differently in different times and places. In reaction came Communism and anti-imperialism. But now we are on the other side of all that, and once again we don’t’ really know what we are motivated by, or what we are fighting about. We can see bits of it, but we see those bits through our accustomed framework, which guarantees that we don’t see it in the way it will be seen in hindsight.
The religious wars that closed the middle ages foresaw nothing of this. As late as 1620, Pilgrims came to the New World hoping to be the city on a hill that would show people how to return to what was already irretrievably past. As late as the 1660s, Englishmen were killing each other thinking they were fighting over religion, and the Frenchmen and Germans were doing the same thing under the same misapprehension.
Today, internationally, we see what look like wars between civilizations. But eventually, looking back, people won’t see Western and Russian and Hindu and Muslim and African civilizations as separate, but as regional subdivisions of one global civilization. We can see the beginnings of this already. Proponents of various civilizations may hate each other, may hate the values and mores they are forced (by modern technology) to live among, but they are all on the Internet; they all have radios, and TVs, and movies. They all share certain ways of seeing things that are below their conscious awareness but are partly shaped by the technological underpinnings of society. It’s true of Muslims, it’s true of Russians, it’s true of us. We may or may not feel how we are changing, but the change proceeds.
In fact, I think that one reason so many people are off-balance in their politics is because they know that something is wrong and they are forced to decide (on insufficient data) who is the invisible villain of the piece.
But is something wrong? Or is it that everything we thought we knew is passing away, leaving us confused and fearful? We saw it in the middle ages. We saw it when Napoleon and the forces of the French Revolution swept away the remnants of the feudal order that had replaced the Roman Empire. What reason do we have to think it is not happening again among us?
When the Soviet Union collapsed, surely some of the Western cold warriors were left disoriented and suspicious, perhaps afraid, because the familiar had disappeared, and they didn’t know which of the specters in their minds were real and which were not. The easiest thing to do, when the familiar has disappeared, is to continue in the same old ways, as if it were still there. Naturally, if you go that route, your actions get wilder and less predictable and less rational.
And domestically?
Today you don’t see political parties dividing around questions of wealth and deprivation as they did in the 1930s. Today, what do the words “liberal” and “conservative” mean, in terms of economic policy? Economics were superseded sometime in the 1980s by what were called Family Values. But is there any unmuddled vision of family values today? Instead, the reality of multiple specific issues cutting against one another leaves people trying to believe that they are defenders of traditional values. All the virulent name-calling and expressions of fear and hatred are indicators of the fact that when you can’t say exactly what it is that you are for, it is easier to know what you are against. (Of course, what you are against is more usually a caricature than a reality.)
Some people, looking at all this, are inclined to see it as the result of a plot. But although plotting does go on all the time, in all directions, surely it is simpler to see all this as confused groping to understand the reality that emerges with the birth of any new age.
This posting says it all without saying “raising of human consciousness” or “ascension” or “creating a new culture”, or “conspiracy theory” or any of the other assignments to this time.. I will be interested to see the comments to come.