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 . . .
We have had some Great Leaps Forward which have held: the concept of who has rights has gotten wider and wider and wider, for example. Also the Democrats and moderate Republicans, back when there were moderate Republicans, passed the WIlderness Act, the Endangered Species Act, and the Clean Air and Water Acts. Granted the reactionaries who have now taken over the Republican party, have chipped away considerably.
The really scary thing about the current (by which I mean post-Reagan) political climate isn’t that the Republicans have gone crazy, or that they have different political ideas. The scary thing is the Repubican party is picking away in a planned fashion at the structures which maintain a representative democracy, because they want to institutionalize their anti-democratic, pro-corporate agenda. They want to lock in a return to the Gilded Age. They want things to be worse for the ordinary person than they are now and they want to cut of all means of improvment.That’s the Republican party agenda, and it is different and far more evil than the agendas of previous political parties.
Somewhat akin to the post-Civil War Democratic party in the South only wihtout the overt connection to domestic terrorism and open racism, the goal is to reduce the majority of us to peonage on behalf of the “creators”: suppress voting, de-unionize, shift he tax responsibility downwards, end work condition protections such as overtime pay, make post high school education impossible excepot for the offspring of the “creators”, divide and conquer by dismantling core social structures such as public schools, divide and conquer through hate/fear mongering wedge issues, increase poverty by defunding Medicaid and turning Medicare into a voucher program…
There should be little surety that This WIll Pass. It won’t if the Republicans have their way.
Of course putting as many rightwing extremists on courts at every level as possible is part of it, as is Citizens United.
http://prospect.org/article/how-romney-brilliantly-summed-gop-ideology-single-sentence
The biggest difference that I see today in the US is this. In the 1950s, nobody (possible exception: whites in the South) thought that either party was trying to destroy the nation. We might not like some of the things that one (or both) parties wanted to do. But nobody doubted that they were well intentioned, no matter how daft we thought their actions were.
But today, that is this century, we see people who are, as far as I can tell, absolutely certain that the other party is determined to destroy the nation as a policy goal, not the by-product of folly. In short, they are not wrong, but actively and deliberately evil. Both parties have some of these, although the Republicans appear to have vastly greater numbers of them. (Possible because, having been out of the Presidency more recently, they caught the trend further along.)
That makes getting along more difficult. It definitely makes getting anything accomplished (of any kind) far more difficult. After all, if someone who is, not just wrong but evil, proposes something, it simply must be a bad idea. No matter how much you thought you liked it last week.
And here is where dr ngo’s first comment comes in. It is far, far easier to find someone relatively close to you alien if you have no experience of people farther away. In fact, it is far harder to understand and sympathize with anything about them, if you have no clue just how different people can be, and are, elsewhere around the world. (Which is why anthropologists tend to look down on sociologists: they think the latter are working from too narrow a database to really understand how groups of people work.)
Republicans use the fear of the OPther as a divide and conquer technique. I don’t. I know lots of Republicans and they are all face to face nice people, or most of them anyway. I’m sure your average Tea partier is nice, too. In fact one of the foster homes for a rescue that especializes in old unadotable dogs, is a Tera Party activist.
That doesn’t change facts about the policies and tactics of the Republican party however. Nice as individual Repubicans maybe be, they are still people whoare voting for a party that is systematically and deliberately dismantling all fo teh routes to a living wage for the ordianry person in order to entrench in power those who already have power.
I know enough history to know that some stories do not have happy endings. People are capable of taking a reasonably successful society and turning into a rotten one. Our current politics, which is a debate between those who see politics in selfish terms and those who don’t, is not new. What is new, meaning post-WWII new, is the effort by one party to undermine democracy in order to institutionalize policies which are unpopular and detrimental to most Americans, including most of their own voters.
Like LJ, I grew up in a time when all of the boats were rising. The Republican party is opposed to everything that helped those boats rise. My generation will be the last one to have a comfortable retirement. I was born at the right time and will die before things really suck. I feel sorry for the younger people.
Hi Laura, Just to remind you, this is dr ngo, I’m just posting for him until we can get typepad worked out for him.
I have an especially acute/attenuated version of what dr ngo talks about. My daughters are growing up bilingual English/Japanese. Cool, right? No one can not like someone being bilingual, eh? But I retain this sinking suspicion that knowing Japanese is like being double jointed, or able to belch on command: something that 3rd graders think is the neatest thing, but when you grow up, you find that it doesn’t actually help you. If it were just me watching things go do, I wouldn’t be so fussed. But thinking about what opportunities are open for your kids, well, that really sucks.
But I retain this sinking suspicion that knowing Japanese is like being double jointed, or able to belch on command: something that 3rd graders think is the neatest thing, but when you grow up, you find that it doesn’t actually help you.
Your suspicion is incorrect. I’m not talking about practicalities, either. Fluency in more than one language is a wondrous thing to have.
In Japanese, there is a phrase oya baka, which indicates a parent who is ‘crazy’ (baka means fool) over their kids. When I see my daughters move from one language to another without blinking an eye, it is wondrous and I move into that territory. But it is hard to truly present that feeling that this country is adrift and will not figure out what to do (though I often share the good doctor’s feeling about the US and think at least it’s not as bad as it is there!). It’s not that I wish they were monolingual, it is just that being fluent in Japanese starts to look like being fluent in Nahuatl, satisfying and interesting, but not really helpful for future success. Well, at least it isn’t Klingon.
But I retain this sinking suspicion that knowing Japanese is like being double jointed, or able to belch on command: something that 3rd graders think is the neatest thing, but when you grow up, you find that it doesn’t actually help you. If it were just me watching things go do, I wouldn’t be so fussed. But thinking about what opportunities are open for your kids, well, that really sucks.
Isn’t the fear really that everything is this? That in the world we’re headed for, no skill, no secret gimmick, no extracurricular activity on the resume, will ever help our doomed, doomed children, no matter what?
And if there were something, would it really be OK to take that advantage over the other poor doomed kids?
My daughter is 6. I’m teaching her to be curious about the world, to be interested in reading and math and science, to be skeptical and questioning and amazed at the things that are amazing. I’m still at least half-convinced that I’m selling her a lie, and when she grows up, she will live a life of misery and degradation in a destroyed world. And I don’t know how to prepare her for that.
…Now, that said, I have some reasons for hope.
Specifically with regard to the US, I think that our current political moment is really the long playing-out of the aftermath of two things, the Civil Rights Movement and the Cold War. Domestically, the modern thing that calls itself movement conservatism is basically still the backlash to the CRM, though if you ask them they’ll deny it (often sincerely, because the animus got transferred from resentment over civil-rights measures to a vague feeling that the feds are too intrusive and their tax dollars are being given to the undeserving).
The backlash is eventually going to be marginalized simply by the relative (and maybe absolute) decline in numbers of white people. That’s not to say that what replaces it will be all good, sweetness and light to a modern-day liberal. There will always be conservatives of some sort, and in some scenarios, the people now calling themselves liberals will be them. But the particular kind of crazy that is currently an obstruction to the US political system doing anything constructive is gradually going away.
The Cold War aftermath manifests itself in the bloated and intrusive national-security state, and also in the way we can still tar any kind of social-welfare program by implying that it’s crypto-Communist. The security state is abetted by technological improvements and got a whole new lease on life because of the September 11th attacks, so I am less hopeful there in the medium term; sometimes it seems like authoritarian measures in the name of protection against terrorist attacks can only ever ratchet up, because nobody wants to be the guy who let down their guard the time the attack happened.
But, on the whole, the world is actually getting less dangerous in terms of direct threats from bad guys, which makes it harder to sustain forever. Meanwhile, the kids don’t know what people are talking about when they use “socialism” as an all-purpose boogeyman.
At the very least, the threat of ten-thousand-warhead thermonuclear Armageddon has dialed way down, though it’s still lurking to some degree. People talk about permanent war as if it were some kind of definitional aspect of being American. But there’s permanent war and there’s permanent war. Things actually were different when I was a kid, and in some ways worse.
That’s a good observation, Matt. It feels like you need to make sure your kid (i.e. you) doesn’t screw everything up. At least it feels that way to me.
“I think that our current political moment is really the long playing-out of the aftermath of two things, the Civil Rights “Movement and the Cold War. Domestically, the modern thing that calls itself movement conservatism is basically still the backlash to the CRM, though if you ask them they’ll deny it (often sincerely, because the animus got transferred from resentment over civil-rights measures to a vague feeling that the feds are too intrusive and their tax dollars are being given to the undeserving).”
I think this is correct at the grass roots level. However, the leadership of the party–people like Atwood, Rove and Norquist–know very well that Bums On Welfare is a lot of bullshit. The leaders of the party are motivated by the desire to entrench themselves in power and wealth. Probably some of them sincerely beieve in Ayn Rand Social Darwinism, while others are less sincere. I don’t really care, but then I am of the opinion that the more seriously a person takes Ayn Rand, the less seriously any of us should take that person.
But, point is, whatever the beliefs, rationalizations, and motivations, the effect of the policies and tactics of the laedership of the R party is to impoverish the majority in favor of establishing an aristocracy of wealth and power. That’s the goal. And that goal will remain even when the appeal to racism or resentment has played out.
The thing is, Social Darwinism has reigned supreme before. In the late 19th century US, plutocrats were almost completely unencumbered and had extraordinary power, and there was absolutely nothing for the poor and a relatively small middle class. And somehow that got dialed back a little, for a while. We’re still not back to the 19th-century norm, which was amazingly bad.
Obviously the same conditions aren’t going to repeat, and we wouldn’t want them to (part of what happened was two world wars and a Great Depression). But there seem to be ways out of this.
A bit after the 19th century, but:
Since seeing the documentary described at the link above, I almost always think of this as an example of what the ultimate end of conservative deregulation and anti-labor polices might look like. It ain’t pretty.
Do you all know the story of the Johnson County War? It’s prettry interesting. I read several books about it years ago when I was on an extended jag of reading about the West.
Here’sthe basic story: in Buffalo, Johnson County, the ranches were small family affairs, often immigrant families. Down by Cheyenne, things were different. That was cattle baron territory, American born men and some English aristocrats. The Cheyenne gang used the presence of rustlers as an excuse to hire fifty mercenaries from Texas to invade johnson county with a hit list of niinety people to murder, including the sheriff. they cut telegraph wires and hired a train.
The first homestead they encountered did shelter a real rustler: Nate Champion. Nate held off the cattle barons and their hired thugs for a day or two before comitting suicide by bullet. he kept a diary of the fight.
While Nate was holding off the cattle barons and thugs, Jack Flagg, a local rancher happened by. jack couldn’t tell what was going on exactly but he raced into town and told the sheriff. The sheriff put together a posse and they surrounded and captured the cattle barons and thugs.
The CB’s and thugs were then turned over to the army,
ANd then powerful politcal interests in Washington DC intervened, rescuing the CB’s (and the thugs, too, I think).
That’s how I remember the story, anyway. It has always seemed to me to be the quitessential story of the American West.