by dr ngo
Another advantage of aging is that it helps give us
perspective on the world over time, just as travel, especially residence
abroad, helps provide perspective on the world across space and ethnicity. Put
in terms of academe, both history and area studies point us to alternatives to
what it's like all around us. Things don't have to be as they are. (Fiction,
particularly science fiction, may do this even more memorably, but reality is
more real.)
The fact is that we all grow up thinking that the world is –
and always has been, and really ought to be – more or less what we ourselves
have encountered. When we're very young, we think all families are like ours: kids
have mommy and daddy and siblings (or not); this is what the mommy does and
what the daddy does; these are the other relatives that sometimes show up, etc.
That's “normal,” for us; it's the human experience.
And though before long we come to understand that there are
different kinds of families – though how different, and how “normal,” remain
significant variables – we persist in larger mythologies about what communities
and countries are like (= our community, our country), what schools and
churches and elections are like (= our school, our church, our elections), and
what human nature itself is like (= us). And therefore, by implication, why
those who don't think and behave like us are Doing It Wrong.
This is what we feel, even though we know better. Since the
ancient Greeks, if not before, we have known that nothing in life is constant. Everything
changes; you can't step in the same river twice; the universe is not fixed
Platonic essences, but a constant state of Heraclitean flux. In our hearts,
however, we deny this:
I conceive of beings static,
Which is reasoning erratic
That I borrowed from the Attic:
Yet 'tis true
That I dream not of emotion,
Mutability or motion,
Or the everchanging ocean,
But of you.
Experience
helps – or should help – overcome this sentiment; the study of history just
does so more systematically. Sometimes when people find I'm a historian,
they'll say, “Doesn't history show that people everywhere are always pretty
much the same?,” and I'll try to mutter some polite response, because a social
gathering is not the place to argue the point or to parse precisely what is
meant by “pretty much the same.” But the honest answer would be “No – or at
least not necessarily.”
For one thing, almost anything that can be measured has
recurrent ups and downs – climate, the Dow, women's hemlines. Global warming is
not disproved by a season of cooler temperatures. Nothing is linear above the
level of basic physics/chemistry, and I'm not even sure about that. Everything
goes up and down, despite Lucy's attempt to gainsay this truism:
Charlie Brown: "Well Lucy, life does have it's ups
and downs, you know."
Lucy: "But why? Why should it? Why can't my life be all UPS? If I want all UPS, why can't I have them?.....Why can't I just move from one UP to another UP? Why can't I just go from and UP to an UPPER-UP?......I
don't want any Downs! I Just want Ups
and Ups and Ups and Ups!"
But
the more important question is whether there are long-term trends – up, down,
or level/constant. (Many cultures envision cyclical patterns, but for our
purposes we can take cyclical to be a version of “constant,” if the ending
point is where we began. Alternatively, as my old friend and fellow historian Michael Aung-Thwin has pointed out, there may be “spirals,” in which the second
and subsequent times a phenomenon comes around it is consistently higher or
lower than the first time; these we might consider a variant of “upward” or
“downward” trends.) My conclusion on this topic, evolved over nearly seventy
years of living and more than fifty of studying history, echoes Fats Waller:
One Never Knows, Do One?
I
grew up in California in the 1950s, which was about as upward-trending an
environment as any child has experienced since Victorian England. The USA was
the richest and most powerful and best country in the world, we understood. And
California was the very essence of American modernity: the fastest growing, most “advanced,” most enlightened state, with far more college students than
anywhere else in the country, indeed in the world. Whatever happened in
California would generally happen a couple of years later in New York, a decade
in the Midwest, a lifetime in Europe. I'm scarcely a Pollyanna by temperament, so something must have been in the air for me to assume that things were
always, automatically getting better. A lot was wrong, sure – probably more
than I was aware of at the time, but greater knowledge wouldn't have altered
the underlying premise. Setting aside routine ups and downs (I had figured that
much out already), this year was better than last year, and next year would be
better than this.
Sure, we'd make mistakes, but we'd learn from them, and do
better after that. OK, the Russians pipped us into space, but we'd catch up and
pass them. (We did that.) OK, there was still segregation in the South, but Ike
had sent the troops in, and we were gradually defeating racism, just as we had
defeated Hitler. (Not so much.) Democrats and Republicans squabbled with each
other, but a GOP president and a Democratic congress managed to work together
to get things done, including a national highway program, and the economy kept
growing, even with a 90% marginal tax rate at the top. We dominated the 1956 Melbourne Olympics, because we were also the highest, fastest, and strongest
people in the world.
The only real question seemed to be whether we were
“progressing” fast enough, and Kennedy's 1960 campaign was essentially that we
were not. He promised to “get this country moving again,” and the great deadpan
jest of the year was, “What's wrong with Eisenhower? He hasn't done anything.” I
favored the Republicans at the time, thanks to family inclination and my underdeveloped political philosophy, but I never believed for a moment that if the Democrats won they could actually reverse the trend, undo the progress we were predestined to enjoy. They might mess it up a bit, slow it down, but time was definitely on our – on America's – side.
The 1960s began dismantling my assumptions, though some of
them did not crumble until the 1970s, when a few years after Nixon had been
forced out of the White House and the US had been forced out of Vietnam it
became clear that we had not “progressed” after all. The forces of reaction
came back stronger than ever, starting with revisionist accounts of the Vietnam
War (a topic on which I was then teaching), culminating in the 1980 election of
Ronald Reagan, a man who was publicly determined not to learn anything from
history. And of course if you can't acknowledge your mistakes, you can't
correct them, and we didn't, and here we are . . .
(I cannot fully imagine what it must be like to be growing
up more recently in the United States, where so many trends are downward, and
it must seem as if everything is going to hell in a handbasket. I'd like to assure today's youth that This Too Shall Pass, but there would be little real
surety in such assurance.)
To Be Continued . . .
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