by dr ngo
My previous reflections were not intended as a full-scale political/intellectual autobiography, but a prelude to broader questions. What in life changes and what doesn't, taking into account the variations – the “swings and roundabouts” – that accompany both tendencies? Each dynamic, I came to realize, is unique, idiosyncratic. There are no Universal Rules in history. This is what makes it, whether studied professionally or indulged as an avocation, so endlessly intriguing.
The propositions below are necessarily tentative; I try not to take them all that seriously myself.
First, a few things that appear to me flat/constant/recurrent-cyclical (or at least indeterminate in terms of trend), so eventually Everything Old Is New Again:
US politics: There seems to be a long-term reciprocating polarity between plutocracy and populism, the former openly championing the cause of wealth and property against the claims of the masses, the latter trying sporadically to represent the ordinary people. The former has more money, the latter has more people (more potential voters), so the political situation vacillates, depending on which is in the ascendant. We are living now, as I see it, in the second coming of the "Gilded Age" of the late 19th century, dominated by malefactors of great wealth, with Clinton and Obama symbolic counterweights to ruling right-wing Congresses, just as Grover Cleveland was in his time. The first GA was challenged by the Progressives, reasserted itself briefly in the 1920s, then gave way to a populist period beginning with the New Deal and arguably carrying on until the reactionary resurgence that crested in 1980, with Eisenhower (and even Nixon, in domestic policy) playing the mirror of the Grover Cleveland role, no more effectively "conservative" in their time than he had been "liberal" in his. Given SCOTUS ukases that corporations are people and money is speech, it is hard to see the current plutocratic ascendancy being peacefully overthrown, but I suspect that in time – though possibly not my lifetime – it may produce its own "antithesis."
Philippine politics: I began studying this about fifty years ago, hopeful that the best-educated populace in Southeast Asia, practiced in democratic institutions, would flower politically, economically, and culturally, so the country would emerge from the "Third World" as a beacon of enlightenment and progress. Without going into details here, it hasn't turned out that way. Ferdinand Marcos's detour into dictatorship bears much blame, but he's been gone for 27 years now and the elites that replaced him, most deeply rooted in much older politics, have demonstrated a class resilience and an unwillingness to sacrifice for the public good that persist to this day. The political dynamics are best described in An Anarchy of Families. This book was written five years ago, but nothing has really changed since then, as Steven Rood notes after the latest election . Sadly, it appears that some things may never change
The overt role of religion in (American) society: Growing up the general assumption was that it was on its way out; secularism was hardly triumphant, but halfway through the 20th century it appeared to be the wave of the future. Politicians mouthed vaguely pious platitudes, but few were so presumptuous as to trumpet their credos or claim that God himself directed their candidacy. (For that matter, it was also rare, Back in the Day, for athletes to Thank God ostentatiously in their moment of victory.) I was wrong about the trend, though I hardly think it has been completely reversed, so as to continue "upward" indefinitely. (Looking overseas, it appears that the public observance of Christianity is trending downward in Europe, yet Islam is booming everywhere, and even Hinduism and Buddhism are becoming more militant of late, so who knows?) In short: no visible trend.
Where's "nationalism" going? Again, we thought half a lifetime ago that it was in gradual decline, save in newly independent, and thus politically immature, ex-colonies. It had been discredited by the excesses of Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and Imperial Japan in the 1930s-40s, and was on its way to being superseded by "internationalism," whether through the United Nations and similar multilateral institutions (European Union, ASEAN, etc.) or through a globalism of the spirit, as the youth of the world grew up to recognize their primary loyalty to all humankind, not just those born within the same borders. This didn't happen, at least not in anything like the way we once thought it would.
Broadway is dying, and has been dying for at least the last 90 years. I confidently expect it to continue dying for decades to come.
And children don't respect their elders. Bah, humbug.
But there are also developments that seem to me to be "trending" more or less permanently, if sometimes slowly, allowing for year-to-year variations. Aside from climate change – which I've not personally studied, but am sorrowfully convinced is Here To Stay for at least my lifetime, and probably that of my children (and grandchildren?) – a couple stand out for me:
Technology, particularly the computer and its derivatives. Technological change is by no means inherently irreversible. Medieval Europe abandoned (or forgot) much of the technology of the late Roman Empire. Japan actually gave up the gun for centuries after it was introduced. Poison gas, the scourge of World War I, hasn't been widely used since. We got to the Moon, then failed to go ahead and colonize space. It may yet be possible to put GM crops ("Frankenfood") back into Pandora's Box.
But the way in which other commonplace technologies have simply overwhelmed their predecessors suggests that we'll never go back. It's not just the computer, or fancy new gimmicks involving genes and genomes, either. One of my first summer jobs, in the early 1960s, was in the Map Division of the Los Angeles County Assessor's office. There were people still working there who had started before typewriters were introduced (!), but my particular assignment generally involved participating (as a peon) in what was then the cutting edge of copying technology. We were making actual photographic reproductions of property maps, by methods so cumbersome that they are scarcely believable now, and probably lasted less than a decade before Xerox made them wholly obsolete.
Within 15 years, I had students who could not imagine going to the library and actually "taking notes" by reading the material and writing down salient quotations, rather than just photocopying the text and running a yellow marker over the passages thought to be germane, hoping that in the process some knowledge would percolate up the arm into the brain. This, along with many other technologies, is clearly here to stay, even if we can't foresee all the implications.
Rights of women and (racial) minorities. This may seem an odd assertion, given the documented "backlash" against women and the ongoing oppression of minorities, especially African-Americans, but anyone who has lived in the USA since the 1950s ought to acknowledge the changes, seemingly irreversible, that have occurred. Nowadays women are still banned from being Roman Catholic priests, but there were then literally thousands of jobs women could not hold, organizations they could not join, even buildings they could not enter, opportunities that are now open to them. And I see very little sign that this is likely to change. Similarly, overt segregation, like overt slavery before it, is gone. Those who have position, wealth, or power and don't want to share them with women and/or minorities have, of course, developed new ways to discriminate. They will have to be ingeniously resisted: la lucha continua. But I feel confident that here we have a real trend, one I personally regard as "upward."
There are many other issues on which I haven't made up my mind. It seems as if the "sexual revolution" is here to stay, but given the powerful forces of resurgent fundamentalism, I'm not quite sure. (It also depends on what is included in that concept: LGBT rights? Abortion? Pornography? There may be, indeed, Different Strokes For Different Folks.) Steven Pinker has argued that violence has declined over the span of human history, but I haven't yet read The Better Angels of Our Nature, so remain agnostic on that point for now. In terms of cultural production, I have seen in my lifetime both much greater fragmentation (and individualism), given new technologies for the creation and distribution of "art," and growing capitalist consolidation and centralization of the major networks and marketplaces, which may wind up restricting opportunities for expression to the favored few.
"Human nature" itself? Too big, too complex, to generalize. Though as a historian my default assumption tends to be universalist ("In this situation, what would a normal person – what would I – do?") rather than assuming that the stranger, whether past or foreign, is inherently different (which tends to imply "irrational"), I also need to be open to the possibility that some of the people I study do not think as I do/would, but inhabit a different mental universe, something I need to recapture and enter as best I can.
So the querying goes on: is This (whatever "This" is) new, and a signpost to a different future, or is it just more of the same? And the older we get, the more evidence we can bring to bear on such fascinating questions.
Geezers rule.
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