Two things started it. One was all the talk about 2008 being 1929 all over again, and the other was Barack Obama being compared so much to Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
Two years ago or less, there was concern that when Alan Greenspan left government, there would be no-one else in the U.S. with his financial perspicacity to take over. Now, he is being blamed by numerous commentators for having facilitated easy access to credit, which was seen as his greatest accomplishment. And let’s not get started on Ronald Reagan, of whom Dick Cheney once famously remarked to Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill, “You know Paul, Regan proved deficits don’t matter.” Well, they do now.
My thoughts here are prompted by reviews of a couple of books on Marxist perspectives in my Saturday paper. Marxism? Didn’t that disappear when the Berlin Wall fell? That was, like Reagan’s doing, yes? (It wasn’t, but that’s another story).
Marxists, as one reviewer noted, are totally into history. For them, there’s no tomorrow without historical necessity, and that means … well, history. The past determines the future. Which it doesn’t at all, because it merely lays down the current conditions and we choose how to react to them, but then, Marxism is its own universe. (Confession: I never did get past page 14 of The Communist Manifesto, though I do wish I could brace myself to read all of Das Kapital).
The never-realised ascension of the proletariat aside, history has always fascinated me. Marxism, for me, fits into history, not history into Marxism. Some people in the 19th Century followed such political idealism and a small minority explored Hermeticism and mystical perspectives, and both were creative reactions to a building crisis in western society’s evolution. Some countries with solid popular legislative traditions – the Netherlands and Britain especially – kept their monarchies with much reduced power while others that didn’t – Germany, Austria and of course Russia – didn’t make that transition. (Confession: I like the idea of constitutional monarchy, in part because it confuses and annoys libertarian absolutists). Either way, anyone who espouses Thelema finds him or herself confronting the reality of history, and in fact anyone I consider reasonably aware of the world needs history, along with some science, as the basis for knowing where and how it all comes together.
Now, most of the world hasn’t even heard of Thelema, let alone espoused it. But as we start to look more at not just the past couple of years, but back across the decades (who, six months ago, knew even the place-name Bretton Woods, for example?) we are relocating ourselves in a historical perspective. Even if we don’t care about the fixed dollar, Reaganomics and supply-side theory or any of that, we’re all looking at the future, which is the other half of history.
The cover on this week’s Economist shows a small child pulling a vast steel ball of debt. There is consensus across the board, it seems, that we cannot grow the West’s economies to the point where this debt can be paid off in under 20 years. Germany, more deeply mired in recession than the U.S., is reluctant to commit such huge sums, so it might take longer to re-emerge from decline, but could do so in healthier condition (or a less sickly one) than the U.S. will. But German has only a big economy, not a vast one.
This, though is the financial history in which we are stuck, with no viable means of escape other than inflation. In Europe, strongly right-wing parties are on the march – quite literally, in a couple of cases, though cudgel-bearing storm troopers are still absent for now. The Marxists, as noted, are also back, at least as far as the chattering classes and bloggers are concerned. And in Iran, I venture to suggest, the apocalyptic faction outwardly spearheaded by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has trounced Mir-Hossein Mousavi and his young urban liberals (who also blog a lot, or do when the government lets them), precisely over such issues of historical direction.
Give or take a riot and revolution or two, I have to see this as a positive change. North America in particular has been fixated on 18-month timespans for too long. When we all start looking further back and ahead, some of our choices are going to be essentially useless and/or extremist (Hang the corporate fat cats! Destroy the unions! Buy more guns so you, too, can shoot illegal imigrants!) and others are going to be based on a more thoughtful appreciation of long-term trajectories. We are relocating ourselves in history as we de-identify ourselves as consumers, and that alters, if only subtly, our basic conceptions of who and what we are, and what we might eventually accomplish. And if that shift affects only a small group of thoughtful people for now, so be it.