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After the Future

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Quote of the Day: Cornell West

I think a post-Obama America is an America in post-traumatic depression. Because the levels of disillusionment are so deep. Thank God for the new wave of young and prophetic leadership,…

I think a post-Obama America is an America in post-traumatic depression. Because the levels of disillusionment are so deep. Thank God for the new wave of young and prophetic leadership, as with Rev. William Barber, Philip Agnew, and others. But look who’s around the presidential corner. Oh my God, here comes another neo-liberal opportunist par excellence. Hillary herself is coming around the corner. It’s much worse. And you say, “My God, we are an empire in decline.” A culture in decay with a political system that’s dysfunctional, youth who are yearning for something better but our system doesn’t provide them democratic venues, and so all we have are just voices in the wilderness and certain truth-tellers just trying to keep alive some memories of when we had some serious, serious movements and leaders. (Source)

Or they, the youth, have Silicon Valley "idealism".

I haven't had anything to say about events in Ferguson because I have had no desire to belabor the obvious. But I'll do a little belaboring anyway. There is, of course, the centuries-old story of racism being told there, but the bigger story is the way the country is slowly morphing into a police state.The great mistake in Ferguson from the elite perspective was that in its overreaction the Ferguson police put a spotlight on what elites would prefer to remain in dark. Editorialists throw their hands up in dismay about the militarized police, but nothing is going to change because the power elite in this country wants a police state. 

It's not about 9/11 or a post-9/11 mentality. 9/11 was just the excuse. A  largely unconscious and anxious people accepted the message that all this nonsense at airports, etc., was being done to keep them safe. Please. The post-9/11 security freak out has always been about the deep anxiety of post-Reagan Neoliberal elites to protect themselves–not the rest of us. It's the rest of us they are worried about.

The post 9/11 security freakout is about the even older-than-racism story of deeply anxious elites to protect themselves from the inevitable revolt of the resentful, deprived masses, whether they are carrying torches and pitchforks or backpack nukes. These elites are like the monkey who cannot let go of the banana in the jar. But whether they are conscious or unconscious of it, the cosmic law of What Goes Around Comes Around will inevitably seek to balance things out, and the jar will be shattered  the banana taken away. 

I thnk 2008 was a turning point. It was the point of no return. There was an opportunity to change the rules, but it wasn't taken. So this age old-farce will have to play itself out in violence. Ferguson is the future, not just because racism persists, but because greed and stupidity do.  

Comments

8 responses

  1. Mark Avatar
    Mark

    Well this got pessimistic very fast…

    Reply
  2. Jack Whelan Avatar
    Jack Whelan

    I don’t think it’s pessimistic; it’s more of a historical deduction based on my understanding of human nature and history. I could be wrong, but it’s hard for me to imagine what could happen that will enable us to avert this continued deterioration of the vast majority of Americans into peonage.
    We’ll see what the next thirty years brings. I’m working on a piece now that is too schematic for most people, but if nothing else, it’s something to provoke clarifying arguments. It will focus on the history of the US in eight thirty year phases from 1770 to 2010–and then?. That first thirty-year phase from 1770–1800 was one of republican citizen idealism the last one from 1980 to 2010 of Neoliberal consumerist delusion/cynicism.
    Here’s roughly how I’m thinking about each of these phases:
    Phase 1: 1770-1800–Republican Idealism
    Phase 2: 1800-1830–Democratization
    Phase 3: 1830-1860–Expansion and Defining the Union
    Phase 4: 1860-1890–Industrialization
    Phase 5: 1890-1920–Progressivism and Modernization
    Phase 6: 1920-1950–Development of the Big Central State
    Phase 7: 1950-1980–Social Democratic/Technocratic Consensus
    Phase 8: 1980-2010–Neoliberal Deterioration
    Phase 9: 2010-2040–Post modern Economic Warlordism and Peonage??

    Reply
  3. Jonathan Avatar
    Jonathan

    This scheme seems to move from some consideration of cultural and intellectual factors to a materialist viewpoint. Is that intentional? It’s not like there weren’t economic conditions in 1770-1800, or cultural problems in 2014.

    Reply
  4. Jack Whelan Avatar
    Jack Whelan

    Jonathan,I think that as with any scheme like this, it’s useful only insofar as it helps you to get a handle on the big picture, and in this instance the big picture I’m attempting to define is the big themes that provide the defining context for everything else that is going on, and obviously lots is going on.
    There might be a time in one’s life when he has just published his first best seller, the same weak his wife has announced she’s divorcing him and he’s been diagnosed with Parkinson’s Disease. When you’re living it, it’s hard to know which is the dominant theme, but twenty years later, you would probably be able to say one or the other was the more important and life shaping event. I could see any one of them playing that role. It’s not to say that the others are unimportant, but that one has a greater shaping influence on one’s life when seen in retrospect.
    So the same is true for us now while we’re living through who we are. I am interested in my amateurish way to understand where we’ve come from so as to have a way to think about where we are going. But whether what we think now turns out to be right or not, I think it’s worth thinking about, and to think about it well we have to understand the big themes that brought us here. History feels discontinuous when you’re living through big events, but doesn’t look that way from a distance. I’m trying to look at it from 30,000 feet up.
    I see these phases, even the economic and materialistic ones as spiritual preoccupatons. Each has a ‘spirit’, and my labeling of the phases, while provisional, is an attempt to point to what the spirits of those preoccupations were. These preoccupations are the ideas and shaping values that distinguish themselves from others by the degree to which they bear a relationship to what is happening on the ground shaping the minds of the people who shape the larger social reality. To what degree they ware shapers or shapees is another question.
    Are there other people preoccupied by other things? Of course. As now, there are lots of people living through history oblivious of these themes, but that doesn’t mean that their different preoccupations aren’t being affected by them.

    Reply
  5. Jack Whelan Avatar
    Jack Whelan

    I like the thirty year scheme because its something the imagination can grasp; most of us live through the best part of three of them. You get a sense that the distance between 1770 and 1820 is not that great, not any greater than the distance between 1950, my birth year, and 2010. It might seem arbitrary, but it’s nevertheless helpful to the imagination, mine at least, to think in these thirty year chunks.

    Reply
  6. Jonathan Avatar
    Jonathan

    30 year periods make perfect sense, since that’s basically a generation. Demographic clustering is something of a new phenomenon, foisted on us (especially in the US) by WWII. But still, I think generation-sized periods make sense for what you’re trying to do.

    Reply
  7. Jack Whelan Avatar
    Jack Whelan

    In my family, that’s almost exactly true. My grandmother’s life spanned the period form 1890-1980, my father, sill living, from 1920 to 2010+. 1890 seems so long ago, but it isn’t when you think of it as within the life experience of people you have known. And her birth 120 years ago is exactly the midpoint between 2010 and 1770 when I begin my 30 year scheme.
    My son was born in 1990, so he doesn’t quite follow the family pattern, but assuming he lives till 90 as does seem to be the family pattern, I’ll have been blood related to people I have spent a good chunk of my life with whose lives combined will span almost 200 years. And that’s not counting grandkids I may have at some point. It feels much less abstract when you imagine it that way. but its the same difference as between 1850 and 1650. It would be nice if we could return to a sense not so much of calendar time, but of–Well, when this happened in my great grandfather’s youth. . .” referring to something that happened in the 1860s or ’70s during the Industrial Phase..

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  8. Mark Avatar
    Mark

    Yeah I’ve thought about this a lot too. It starts to really shrink time when you think about it in terms of people you know.
    People classically deal with five generations: their grandparents, parents, siblings, children, and grandchildren. Many people also know at least one great-grandparent and/or one great-grandchild, and this is more true as lifespans expand (though, on the other-hand, that is somewhat counteracted by marriage and childbearing being later and later).
    Still, I knew one great-grandparent as a kid who was born in 1902. If my dad hadn’t been given up for adoption, I would have known a great-grandparent born in 1900 well into my teens (his birth-mother’s father died at 106 when I was 16, though we were unaware of them at the time).
    I probably won’t have (adopt) kids until sometime in the 2020s (if I do at all; but there will certainly be blood nieces and nephews) and they won’t until the 2050s when I’m in my 60s or 70s. But I’ll probably have twenty-some years knowing and loving those grandkids…who (if the health system keeps up) may well (at least some of them) live into the 2150s. So people I’ve known and loved would span 250+ years. And even if you don’t count the great-grandmother because she died when I was pretty young…still, I knew grandparents (well) born as early as 1919…so 230-some years spanned by people I’ll have known and been important to. America was founded that long ago! And if, on the other hand, I’m lucky enough to meet a great-grandchild in my 90s or something, born in the 2080s…they could live into the 2180s…280 years from great-gradmother to great-grandchild.
    But it goes further. I tend to think our thought world admits of one degree of separation. It’s not just people we knew, but also people who were known by people we knew who still touch us. I didn’t know my dad’s grandparents, but he did, and I know him…so I still hear lots of stories about them and they’re still real and known to me because they are part of him, and I know him (Beyond that, an additional degree of separation…and you’ve got pure strangers as far as I’m concerned.)
    Still, since most people know pretty well their grandparents and grandchildren (at least)…this means that we also feel some connection to THEIR grandparents and (by future projection) grandchildren, since if we care about someone or have an intense connection with them, we also tend to care “indirectly” about anyone they would, in turn, consider important to them. I know my grandmother, and she still talks about and has living memory of her own grandparents who were born in the 1870s. So my connection spans back that far.
    Though that’s where it stops, I think, since I never knew them personally, merely as “part of my grandmother”…and the mere memory does not itself transmit much of a memory of anything prior to that; ie, I’ve never heard my grandmother tell a story about her grandmother telling a story about HER grandmother. If we were more self-conscious about tradition, we might…but our culture just isn’t that way. I will certainly tell my children and even grandchildren about my grandparents…but I can’t really imagine telling them the few vague things my grandparents told me about THEIR grandparents. Historic memory does “fade” this way. We care about our grandparent’s grandparents because they contributed to the life of someone we ourselves actually know and care about. But beyond that, TWO layers of memory is no better than a stranger.
    And my grandchildren will know grandchildren born possibly in the 2110s who could live to 2210. 1870-2210 within the realm of this sort of “personal memory” (either people I knew/will know, or who were known by them and conveyed in memory to me, or people to whom I was conveyed in memory by those who actually knew me). 350 years possibly. That’s pretty good.
    And SOME people (though it becomes rarer, I assume) could well go back another 50 and forward another 50 if they actually were old enough to hear a GREAT-grandparent reminiscing about THEIR grandparent or great-grandparent, or if they live long enough to meet a GREAT-grandchild who is old enough to “remember them” to THEIR grandchild or great-grandchild later on, ie, if you get supercentenarians involved.
    It becomes rather mind blowing.
    I imagine someone born in 1750. Maybe he knew a grandparent or great-grandparent who was 100 when he was born and lived to 110 (there’s a few in every generation). So he knew someone from 1650 in his boyhood up to the age of 10. And lets say he lives to 1850 or 1860 himself. Maybe he knows a great-grandchild born in 1850, and this person lives to 1950 or 1960. That’s pretty good! Someone alive in 1650 knew the same person as someone alive in 1950 (albeit at different ends of their lives). It probably happened in at least one case (especially if it was just “anyone you knew or met” rather than limiting it to the ancestor/descendent relationship).
    But if we expand it further and include my “living memory” idea allowing one degree of separation, the 1650 guy known by the 1750 kid…could easily have told him a story about encountering someone from the 1500s. And the guy dying in the 1950s could easily have told some kid still alive today about the 1700s guy he knew. So the guys’ horizons of “living memory” expand from the 1500s into the 2000s.
    I think this is the fascination behind facts like that President John Tyler’s (born 1790s) grandchildren are still alive (though they probably didn’t meet him personally…he had a son in his 70s):
    http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/01/25/pres-john-tylers-grandchildren-still-alive_n_1232430.html
    And the fact that the last civil war widow only died in 2008 (though the last one actually still collecting a civil war pension died in 2003). Kid who enlists at, say, 14 (if fraudulently) in 1865 would have been born in 1851. It’s at least feasible he could live to 105 in 1956 and marry some 14 year old girl (she would have been born 1942). Such a girl would only be 72! So if things had worked out “ideally” there could be a Civil War widow until almost 2050.
    There have been super-centenarians (though rare) throughout history. The only improbability comes in the idea of a chain of them actually meeting (and telling the next one about their own similar meeting in childhood). Still, the mere fact that it is not impossible gives us awe.
    1750 guy could have had direct experience (ie, known/been known by) people whose lives spanned 1650 to 1950. And his “horizon of living memory” (ie, known/been known by OR privy to a firsthand memory of OR himself the subject of such a firsthand account received later) could extend 1500s to 2000s. Imagine to be able to say of this person, to look at a photograph of him at say age 50 in 1800, and say “When he was a kid, he remembered a really old man telling him about a guy from the 1500s” but then also “And now in 2014, there is someone alive who remembers an old man relaying a similar firsthand account of him.” His horizons of living memory would be incredible. And yet it’s possible, if improbable.
    So now I imagine someone born in 200, someone in 700, someone in 1200, and a guy in 1700. Their horizons just barely touching at the edges (ie, at 500, 1000, 1500). The person born in 200 might be able to remember in his boyhood meeting a man born in 100, and hearing stories from him about meeting the aged Apostle John. But if he himself lives 100 years, and died around 300, then someone over 100 years old in 400 might still have known him. So in 500 an old person might still remember hearing stories in boyhood from the person dying in 400 about the person dying in 300 who was born in 200. So this person in 500 has “living memory” (ie, has heard a firsthand account of) someone alive in 200, knew him at least indirectly as part of the experiences of someone else he did know directly…but then will himself be possibly subject to such a firsthand account relayed to someone in 600 who dies in 700.
    So there have only really been 4 “Great Generations” between us and Christ. Which is to say, only 4 (potential; that’s what really matters anyway, it’s unlikely there is really a chain of such people, but there COULD have been and that’s what’s fascinating) horizons of memory-lifespans (assuming a few supercentenarians in each generation) that have been totally surpassed. And only 7 leaps if you want to do fully integrated-overlapping horizons (9 if you count the “end-posts”) of living memory. (200, 500, 700, 1000, 1200, 1500, 1700)
    I wonder if there is any “systemic” significance to these times. “The Time it takes for a Time to be totally forgotten.” The horizon beyond which (in the direction of the past) there are no memories of even firsthand accounts of anyone who lived in that Time left in any living brains, no one who knew them directly or even indirectly as part of someone else’s life, and (in the direction of the future) beyond which we cannot imagine any living brain containing a memory of even a firsthand account of us, no one left who knew us directly or even indirectly as part of someone else’s life. The time it takes for us to forget and then to be forgotten.
    I was born 1989 and let’s say even that I live to 2089 (who knows!) With me (or my generation, rather) will die the memories of my grandmother lovingly describing her grandfather (born 1870). With her death will die anyone having known him directly. With my death will die anyone having known him even indirectly (ie, I knew him inasmuch as he was part of my grandmother’s life, and I did know her). Someday my own grandkids (born 2050, let’s say) will tell their own grandkids (born 2110, let’s say) about me (I hope; if I create enough of an impression!) But when my grandkids’ grandkids die (in say, even 2210) then even the last firsthand account (given by my grandkids and preserved in THEIR grandkids brains) will die, the last memory that I was even part of the life of someone once known by someone still alive.
    So my horizons of living memory are, say 1870 to 2210 at most. 350 years (but then, I wasn’t talking to all supercentenarians). I’ll have received the last indirect knowledge of people born 1870 (as part of the life of someone born in 1920 whom I knew in the 1990s and 2000s) and, in turn, will be extinguished AS a received firsthand account myself by someone dying in in 2210 (given to them sometime in the 2110s by someone they knew born in the 2050s).
    I wonder if there is any civilizational structural significance to this “grand level” timeframe. “The time it takes to forget.” That would be in one direction (ie, from the time a person is born, to the time the last memory of a firsthand account dies). But then “double” the time it takes to forget seems significant too…because each of us will both be subject to the forgetting (inasmuch as, when we die, there is no one left who remembers a firsthand story of our grandparent’s grandparents, no one who knew a life they were a part of) but also will be each forgotten (inasmuch as, when our grandchildren’s grandchildren die, no memories of firsthand accounts of us will be left either, no one will be left who knew any life of which we were a part).
    I wonder if there is a “Great Cycle” in these horizons, naturally built into human generation, on the civilizational scale (where the maximum, assuming a few supercentenarians, seems to be about 500 years; though for most individuals the horizons are smaller, around 350)…

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