social change – Becoming Human

New Year’s Eve used to be nice.

As long as I can remember though, here where I am it’s always been pretty grim. And it seems only to get grimmer, with increasing vandalism and violence.

Worse than this, all this antisocial tumult is clearly feeding a disturbing vein of intolerance and far-right sentiment.

Viewed from one angle, the 2010s look like a lost decade. After the financial meltdown of 2008 it was clear we were at a social and economic watershed. In the 2010s, however, all we did was muddle through with a band-aid or two applied to this leaky dinghy whilst the seas only became rougher. We doubled down on our obsolete system of financial capitalism knowing full well it was long past its sell-by date. We capitulated in the face of orchestrated hate campaigns ably designed to promote our most atavistic sentiments and those prepared most grossly to incarnate them. Meanwhile the urgency of action to limit and mitigate climate change became increasingly apparent, but it seems the gulf between those who cared and those too frightened to think for themselves only widened.

The right has played a classic game of divide and conquer, but the left has cruelly disappointed. Obsessed with political correctness and the most obscure of progressive causes, it has alienated its own base and delivered them into the hands of the most cynical of its opponents. It has been largely unable to go beyond its Marxist paradigm and rethink social policy for an age in which capital formation has become redundant and the relations between capital and labor have radically shifted. Both the right and the left are committed to keeping the masses in a state of waged or unwaged serfdom.

It seems that only a fool would look forward to the 2020s, and rightly I think morosity predominates. But it does not serve us and it is full of dangers. In the end we will have the world we dream of, and if we allow ourselves to dream the dark dreams prescribed us by others, we choose the side of darkness with them.

Not so long ago, many of us were quite upbeat about social changes. We felt that, on a deeper level, consciousness was evolving. We knew that the new ideas we were striving for and so desperately needed were so alien to every concept developed in the last 10 000 years of human history that no one could ever have expected them to be articulated and adopted in the space of a few years. Yet it really seemed that we were making a start. What went wrong?

I think the alarming manifestations of human savagery we see all around us today are a consequence of the fact that these dark forces feel no longer safe in their subliminal rabbit holes. We have drawn bigotry and cynicism out into the open. With a face and a name we should be able to fight them much more easily. But we are terrified by accumulated trauma and resort, ourselves, to the tools of hate they have taught us are the only way.

The 2020s will only put humankind on a path to a better future if we stop employing the tools of our enemy. The patriarchy feeds on violence. Even when it loses, it wins.

We need to stop seeing the other as an enemy out there and start seeing it as a manifestation of our own unresolved conflicts. Something we need to understand, empathize with, learn from and heal, not try to eradicate in a paroxysm of allopathic folly. We need to be angry that things are the way they are, but not that people are the way they are. We need to reclaim civil space, but not ghettoize those who are condemned to reject us by our inability to understand and care for them.

The purveyors of violence are not a tiny minority but merely the tip of an enormous iceberg of persons given no stake in society as a result of our collective inability to imagine and navigate the transition to a post-industrial, more caring future. They haven’t failed; we have failed them. It’s time to acknowledge this.

Yesterday I cited in annex to my post on Sex at Dusk what is a very handy summary of the post-structural turn in the social sciences. Do check it out: it is a comparatively accessible explanation of what is wrong with how most of us view the world. To summarize it in even fewer words: social categories (like “gay” or “straight”, “handicapped”, “sick”, “mad” etc), don’t exist “out there”, they are made up and in constant flux, on the one hand socially negotiated and on the other subject to individual agency. This field of meaning both transmits and transforms culture intergenerationally. The world is the product of our thoughts, and our thoughts can change it; which of course does not mean that absolutely anything is possible, but it does mean that social institutions are a lot more fluid than we are in the habit of thinking, even when their design is not explicitly addressed in the public debate.

It usually astonishes people when I point out how few human generations separate us from what we are used to thinking of as inconceivably remote historical, or even prehistorical, events. They haven’t done the simple math. So here goes: take your pick*.

French Revolution (1789):	9
Trial of Galileo (1633):	15
Excommunication of Martin Luther (1521):	20
Coronation of Charlemagne (800):	49
Sack of Rome by the Goths (410):	64
Julius Caesar’s first invasion of Britain (55 BC):	83
End of the Minoan civilization (1420 BC): (Approximate end of the Bronze Age)	137
Great Pyramid of Giza (2560 BC):	183
Foundation of Byblos (approx. 5000 BC): (The world’s oldest city)	280
Earliest settled agriculture (approx. 8000 BC):	400

It’s nothing, guys. A drop in the ocean. Each of us has only to go back a few dozen generations, if that, before we find officially pagan ancestors, and only a few more before some of them would have been hunter-gatherers. Even if all of your ancestors were agriculturalists, over 95% of your family line as anatomically modern humans were hunter-gatherers.

Every generation recreates for itself the patent illusion of living in a socially stable world. But on Chris Ryan’s most recent podcast, historian Thaddeus Russell mentioned that a number of historians would qualify middle Victorian England as more oppressive than contemporary Saudi Arabia. The same guy managed to get himself fired from Columbia for not much more than applying modern social theory to the history of the United States: analyzing it on the basis of the conflict between individual drives and the norms of the social elite, rather than class struggle or the progress of liberal enlightenment. This is a world that changes at a helter-skelter pace, in ways which of course are both good and bad, but on the whole I doubt if any of us would, if he or she were able, voluntarily choose to live at an earlier period of the history of our culture. I know I feel born too early, and certainly not too late. History is going in the direction which I already manifest in my life. There are certainly major ecological challenges, but socially, what basis is there for anything other than optimism?

So we really should cut out the endless droning on about the supposedly catastrophic destination towards which we all are hurtling and, especially, our supposed inability to do anything about it. By writing these words, which seems a solitary, even solipsistic act, I am already doing something about it. Ultimately, it is words and concepts which generate culture and society. This is a missionary endeavor in which each of us imagines the future into being, as it were colonizes it. We are not powerless at all: and frankly it is both intellectually misconceived and cowardly to imagine we are. As Martin Luther King said, “Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.”

Notes

(*) I have assumed for the purposes of the calculation that the average age of ones parents at birth over the period is 25, which seems a conservative figure, as it is the average over both parents and all children