Clowns of the Future

My fluency in cyclical theories of history is dime shallow. I sort of understand that some very heavy brahmins of international relations have published on the notion that civilizations emerge thrive wither and perish in predictably recurring sequences. I am dimly aware of a conceivably woo belief system that explains the current state of the nation according to a movement of great and inexorable shifts in a pendulum whose arc describes large slow changes deep in the social unconscious. Growing up, the idea that things swing back and forth was ingrained, part of the firmament. We’re comfortable accepting that the dance between action and reaction is one in which the lead alternates. Probably we’re inclined this way from an early age, since rocking back and forth puts us to sleep. The words lull and lullaby encode this sway in syllables.

We’re rightly suspicious of grand explaining theories, rightly suspicious of anything that seems to offer an easy way out of a quantum thicket of vectors, variables and uncertainty. At dinner with friends recently Project 25 was in the air. Allegedly one of the towering intellects behind the project was on the record opining that things were better before women could vote. It occurred to me that—though “things” and “were” and “better” are all debatable—this description could be true and incoherent at the same time. An ad hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy, as when—according to the classic example—a person attributes the sun’s rising to the rooster’s crow, since the two always so neatly coincide. Things were also no doubt “better” according to that guy before Johnny Carson, the Americans with Disabilities Act, and Daylight Savings Time.

Similarly it’s tempting to make a lot out of generational divides. It’s tempting to seek out a “them” who did this to us, even as we are some future generation’s profligate and dilatory them.

It was both odd and unjust, said Gauss, a real example of the pitiful arbitrariness of existence, that you were born into a particular time and held prisoner there whether you wanted it or not. It gave you an indecent advantage over the past and made you a clown vis-a-vis the future.

- from Measuring the World, Daniel Kehlmann

In so far as there is “a” problem, it seems to be human nature. We don’t change very much. A system of behaviors refined over literally millions of years of the gene transmission project, our nature is an engine motoring with endless momentum into a trackless future. The landscape changes, the furniture, the tenant gets a new haircut now and then, but the structure of the narrative doesn’t vary a whole lot. Had I been born in any other time, I believe I would be its creature, capable of whatever villainies or heroics were then in vogue. Had the so-called Greatest Generation been born into wealth and privilege rather than poverty and strife, they’d have been characterized according to the prevailing vicissitudes.

A human story is the same again and again, over and over. But our fruits don’t rot. Science and technology accumulate, capital appreciates, culture mounts. One can always mark the animal even as the animal’s workplace evolves beyond recognition. Within that workplace, exit interviews and company historians and fine-tuned procedures do much to store, imprint and convey wisdom, but mistakes happen, things get lost, there are fires. The aspect of cyclical theories of history that chimes most in me is the idea of cultural memory.

A lot of us had parents, grandparents or great-grandparents who survived the Depression. Famously mistrustful of banks, lots of them. They established the FDIC (because they remembered the Depression) and still mistrusted banks (because they remembered the Depression). They’d hoard things—not how we do today, out of fear of an end to excess, but carefully, how you do if you remember hunger. Then they died, and their children started sliding into senescence, and no one my age ever thinks about bank insecurity.

In fact our lack of fears on that score have enabled the dismantling of much of the regulatory framework our ancestors installed to mitigate catastrophe. Which makes catastrophe more likely, which will lead to renewed caution, and thus a cycle repeats.

Photo by Andres Siimon on Unsplash

Given our proclivity to live a certain amount of time before dying, our tendency to spawn at more or less the same age, to respond en masse to big events (wars, vaccines, natural disasters), it isn’t necessarily a coincidence that decades kind of match up over the centuries. Memories come into and pass out of the culture in long waves. In America, you can see an echo of the Progressive Era and the Great Awakening of the 19-aughts and -teens in the 20-aughts and -teens. The 20s in both centuries were/are periods of exaggerated inequality and decadence.

I’m exploring this now because it’s too easy, at this moment, to feel totally hopeless. We’ve permitted criminals to take command of the richest, most polluting and most apocalyptically armed nation in the history of the world. The now is bleak, the future unthinkably grim. A lot of Americans—and most of the world—are straight-up victims of this bullshit, but a critical block of us collaborated in it. We will all get what they deserve. And the reckless, shortsighted, corrupt fools we’ve empowered will bring ruin.

But maybe ruin is just part of the deal. Maybe that’s a lesson of history.

If the Depression was the enormous weird exception that colored for the rest of their lives the lives of my grandparents, the society that came out of it, the middle American century of relative stability, equality and transparency, that my grandparents built, was the enormous weird exception that colored for the rest of their lives the lives of my parents.

If I am lucky I will live to see whatever upheaval the 60s bring this time around. That decade’s always good for some fireworks. And if I’m really lucky, the coming desolation of the 30s will have set the stage for an intervening shift toward better days.

We’ve seen this movie before.