Tag Archives: pessimism

Time Travel

I found these opening paragraphs from an essay on Zadie Smith and optimism to be comforting:

All the goodness and the heroisms will rise up again, then be cut down again and rise up,” John Steinbeck wrote to his best friend at the peak of WWII. “It isn’t that the evil thing wins — it never will — but that it doesn’t die.”

Caught in the maelstrom of the moment, we forget this cyclical nature of history — history being merely the rosary of moments the future strings of its pasts. We forget that the present always looks different from the inside than it does from the outside — something James Baldwin knew when, in considering why Shakespeare endures, he observed: “It is said that his time was easier than ours, but I doubt it — no time can be easy if one is living through it.” We forget that our particular moment, with all its tribulations and triumphs, is not neatly islanded in the river of time but swept afloat by massive cultural currents that have raged long before it and will rage long after.

It is easy to be depressed and disheartened–as discussions on this site have illustrated–by evidence that what most of us believed was progress toward a kinder and gentler world is being intentionally dismantled by MAGA’s cult leader. The Steinbeck quote is apt; it reminds us that there have always been, and always will be, people whose moral and emotional defects drive them to do evil. The unspoken element of that observation is that there are always good people, too, and the “long arc of history” teaches that the good guys eventually prevail.

Not, granted, without a lot of suffering and losses…

In a speech delivered in the wake of the 2016 election, Smith offered an example of “overcoming” that is particularly pertinent when considering MAGA’s racist, homophobic and anti-Semitic White Christian Nationalists.

My best friend during my youth — now my husband — is himself from Northern Ireland, an area where people who look absolutely identical to each other, eat the same food, pray to the same God, read the same holy book, wear the same clothes and celebrate the same holidays have yet spent four hundred years at war over a relatively minor doctrinal difference they later allowed to morph into an all-encompassing argument over land, government and national identity. Racial homogeneity is no guarantor of peace, any more than racial heterogeneity is fated to fail…

I find these days that a wistful form of time travel has become a persistent political theme, both on the right and on the left. On 10 November The New York Times reported that nearly seven in ten Republicans prefer America as it was in the fifties, a nostalgia of course entirely unavailable to a person like me, for in that period I could not vote, marry my husband, have my children, work in the university I work in, or live in my neighborhood. Time travel is a discretionary art: a pleasure trip for some and a horror story for others. Meanwhile some on the left have time-travel fancies of their own, imagining that the same rigid ideological principles once applied to the matters of workers’ rights, welfare and trade can be applied unchanged to a globalized world of fluid capital.

In her speech, Smith reminded us that one must be willfully blind to ignore the fact that the history of human existence is a history of pain: “of brutality, murder, mass extinction, every form of venality and cyclical horror” and that no tribe is entirely innocent of it.

But there is still this redeeming matter of incremental progress. It might look small to those with apocalyptic perspectives, but to she who not so long ago could not vote, or drink from the same water fountain as her fellow citizens, or marry the person she chose, or live in a certain neighborhood, such incremental change feels enormous.

You really should click through and read her remarks–and those of the essayist–in their entirety. The essay serves to place our own very dark time in context, to remind us not just that “this too shall pass,” but that we have a moral obligation to make it pass.

I have always loved a maxim attributed to Native Americans (I’ve forgotten which tribe). It frames morality as our response to two wolves who are fighting within us. One wolf is evil and one is good. The one that wins is the one we choose to feed.

As we face the current cyclical eruption of evil, we need to cling to the lessons of history–and keep feeding our good wolves.

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Looking For Omens

My husband frequently tells me that my posts to this blog are “downers.” Of course he’s right–but in my defense, any age that includes the election of someone like Donald Trump (no matter how accidental or non-reflective of the majority’s choice) is a “downer” age.

The question we face–as Americans, as humans–is: how do we make things better? ( I should stipulate that I mean my version of “better”– not David Duke’s or Pat Robertson’s or the other “Make America Great” supporters of our demented President. My version is a kinder, less hateful, more equal society.)

It is a truism that lasting social change ultimately depends upon widespread cultural shifts. Laws prohibiting discrimination are important, for example, not because they effect overnight change, but because they begin the much slower process of changing people’s attitudes about what is acceptable behavior. (As anyone with eyes can see, that process is still very incomplete.)

The MeToo# movement would have been incomprehensible to my mother’s generation, and is somewhat startling to mine; only after millions of women entered the workforce (a phenomenon that was only possible when reliable birth control allowed us to manage our reproduction) did the overall culture begin to shrug off retrograde beliefs about gender roles–beliefs mostly rooted in religion– and begin to understand the importance and nature of gender equality.

As Kurt Vonnegut would say–and so it goes.

I’m currently doing research for a book (tentative title: Governing the Brave New World), and I am seeing emerging signs of positive culture change/paradigm shift. Some examples are broad acceptance of same-sex marriage, even among younger Evangelicals; growing recognition by businesses that they have responsibilities to employees, customers and their communities as well as their shareholders; men’s endorsement of movements like #metoo and white support for #blacklives matter; rising levels of civic engagement; and diminishing religious fundamentalism.

Much of this is still tentative. Much of it is triggering furious backlash. But it’s there.

There are theories about generational change that suggest political shifts occur every 40 years or so. I have no idea whether the “bright spots” I see are part of this relatively reliable turn toward a reasonable politics or a harbinger of something larger.

What evidence is there for (cautious) optimism?

I often think of a poem my mother (a definite pessimist) would recite: “Twixt optimist and pessimist, the difference is droll. The optimist sees the doughnut, the pessimist, the hole.”

I realize that some regular commenters on this blog are predisposed to see only the hole. (If I saw the world the way Todd evidently does, for example, I’d kill myself.) A number of the people who comment on this site, however, see both the doughnut and the hole, and I’m directing this question primarily to them–although I welcome a response from anyone who wants to weigh in.

What are the omens of positive culture change that you see? What are the indications that America is emerging from the past quarter-century or so of the “me, myself and I” attitudes that have made phrases like “public service” an oxymoron and caused people to sneer at the very idea of the common good? (If at all possible, provide sources for those sightings.)

What are the “uppers” that you see? Inquiring minds want to know!

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