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The World is Too Much With Us

2/23/2024

At the turn of the 19C, the English romantic poet, William Wordsworth wrote a sonnet of this title. In his poem, Wordsworth decried the materialism of that age (a time which seems so organic, measured, and simple to us now) and the alienation from nature which were among his frequent themes. He would likely be saddened, but unsurprised, by our current state.

Here in the early 21C, the world is way too much with us. The “world” of which Wordsworth warned comprised overlapping spheres of affairs, commerce, and “society.” He wasn’t (particularly) talking about the “world” in the sense of globalization or the intrusiveness of technology (whether a telephone ringing or the comments of “Alexa” or “Siri”). Rather, his focus was on the attitudes of the emerging bourgeoisie of late Georgian England. You could say it was a critique of capitalism, avant le lettre.

That spectre is still with us of course. In spades.

However, I take the phrase in a broader and more direct sense. The noise of the world, whether of news, sports, or popular culture, is hemming us in. Yes, this noise exacerbates our distancing from nature (or even a walk in that nature-imitator, the “park”). Its insistence (and not just sonic loudness) crowds out our peace of mind. The newspapers of Wordsworth’s time have blossomed/mushroomed/metastasized into streaming, “social,” and other “media” to such a degree that we must make a sustained effort to escape them. On top of the noise and ubiquity, however, are the aggressive demands for our attention (born of advertising/consumer marketing and sharpened by the overdramatization and hyperbolization of language).

Beyond the incessant clamor of memes and items to be purchased, lies the disorientation of the material world wrought be technology. Wordsworth wrote before the “industrial revolution” had much broad impact on English (much less global) living and working patterns. The Luddites were still a decade in the future for him. But for us, “disruption” is standard. We have not digested the globalization of commerce of the late 20C. The information/robot/AI revolution is, hauntingly, still in its infancy. We’ve gone from Cronkite to cable TV to far more than 500 channels in less than fifty years. We adapt our lives to our appliances. What we work on, how we work and, indeed, why we work are new in every decade.

Families, the traditional bastion of social stability, spin apart geographically; transportation and communications make it seemingly easier to maintain those ties that used to be “in the flesh.” Careers, another mode of continuity, face pressure from the “gig economy,” portable pensions, and job-hunting apps.

There is much freedom and choice in all this; benefits not to be sneezed at. Nor is it useful to imagine a prior world as some pre-lapsarian idyll. But there is a cost; real, if hard to grasp.

Social changes, too, have brought many gains; chipping away at millennia of social injustice. Relationships—whether personal, social, or commercial—are more complex and dynamic. Embedded expectations of who people are and how to relate to them are upset.

All this takes some getting used to, plus there is so much and the pace of change has accelerated so greatly, that it can easily seem overwhelming. This is what I mean by “the world is too much with us.” It is manifest in psychological distress, drug use, political animosity, dis-tethering of established patterns, disorientation, and nihilism. Some seek to reject modernity (or at least the parts of it they fixate upon). Some despair. Some are uncertain. Some disconnect.

Social fabrics are eroding; which would be challenging enough if their weaknesses did not undermine the possibility of political action necessary to even try to wrestle with all this (and the climate crisis, too). Indeed, there is mutually-reinforcing cycle of lack of confidence in joint social/political action and the inability of societies/governments to figure out what to do.

This is hardly a uniquely American problem. It can be seen across the “West” and, in different configurations, among those societies for which modernity is only partial.

Despite Wordsworth’s warning, what we are facing is new, at least in degree. The increased quantity of stress has changed the quality and, as shown in all manner of physical (e.g. polar ice melting) and social (e.g. from discontent to revolution) phenomena, there are discontinuities of response/tipping points.

My point in all this is not to join those in despair/nihilism. Instead, it is to highlight the fundamental and interrelated nature of what we are facing. Superficial and symptomatic solutions (including any number of “normal” political/policy proposals) will only get us so far. Indeed, I don’t hold out too much hope for “macro” solutions; whether governmental or social.

Rather, the best defense against the world being too much with me is to fortify myself and figure out what is really essential in me and work to reject the worldly intrusions/distractions on my attentions and actions. It means managing myself in my slurping from the firehose of media—political, entertainment, gossip. It means constructing activities (hobbies?) that are meaningful to me. It means engaging with other people on a regular, extensive, and substantive basis. It means tamping down “appetites” of whatever variety (not just food/drink). It means centering on myself without being arrogant and greedy. As the old Sufi story says (in the broadest and calmest way): “If I need enough, and want little enough, I shall have delicious food.”

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These Revolutions Were Not Televised

2/16/2024

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I’ve been reading an impressive work of historical synthesis about the Revolutions of 1848 (Christopher Clark’s Revolutionary Spring). It’s certainly not a “mass market” book (although even at 700+ pages, it’s pretty accessible); but it addresses one of the most problematic set of events in modern European history.

That winter and spring of that year saw a widespread series of uprisings across continental Europe, in dozens of locations from Poland to Sicily to Belgium. The ‘top-line’ description of these events is “the revolutions that failed,” since virtually all of them did (at least eventually, and at least on the surface). Governments were toppled, absolute monarchies granted constitutions, radicals and socialists tasted power—briefly—and then “the forces of reaction, entrenched social/political/military elites reasserted control, and scores of people were executed. In France, where the most extensive activity took place, the constitutional monarchy established in 1830 fell, to be replaced by a radical republic in 1848, then a more conservative republic, then by the re-establishment of the Empire under Napoleon’s nephew by 1852.

Yet, despite these reversals, the ideas of change, still strongly echoing across the Continent from the great French Revolution of 1789 (Liberty, Equality, Fraternity!), sometimes hung on or were reinstated over the course of the following decades.

We in the US tend to dismiss revolutions as somebody else’s opportunity/problem. We tend to think, as Sinclair Lewis wrote in his 1935 dystopian novel-turned play about a fascist take-over “It Can’t Happen Here.” Those revolutions that have occurred recently—the fall of Communism thirty+ years ago, the brief moment in Tien-a-min Square in Beijing in 1989, the short-lived “Arab Spring” of 2011—have been distant blips for most of us. Our own Insurrection of 2021 was appalling but highly localized and easily dismissed as a fringish fluke. But just because we’re out of revolutionary practice doesn’t tell us much about the present or future.

Most modern revolutions have come from the “left,” embodying demands for social justice and more distributed political power; testing whether the embedded power structure was too ossified to withstand the energy of the “people.” Some were implemented (more-or-less) through existing legal/constitutional structures, but most involved violence. Nor have they been distinctly “Western” affairs, despite the disproportionate amount of ink spilled on Europe and the Adams/Jefferson/Washington events of the 1770s-80s.

The events of 1848 offer us some useful reminders in our current situation:

1) You can never be sure what will happen next. The Revolutions of 1848 were, generally, surprises. There were agitations, protests, and intellectual ferment to be sure. But the uprisings and violence were each the result of local culture, personalities, and power structures. Most incumbent governments were caught off-guard. Contingencies were dispositive. In times of turmoil, politics (not to mention violence) have been highly dynamic; those who lit the match were often supplanted by others with different priorities or even completely different orientations. We can see in France in the 1790s, again in the 1840s, and in Russia in 1917 a bewildering array of claims to power, some of which lasted only a few weeks.

Is the current environment similar? There is certainly vast discontent in the country and a lot of ideas for change. We had an unsuccessful insurrection three years ago and there are more than a few echoes from Napoleon III to our own orange-haired would-be emperor. There are vague rumblings of a “civil war.” Just as Monty Python famously said: “No one ever expects the Spanish Inquisition,” so too revolutions, while plotted and feared, are rarely announced in advance. The only claims of inevitability (of success or failure) come from lazy historians in retrospect. In the US, the propensity to violence from the 1960s to 1980s has lain mostly in the “left;” but lately it is the “right” that seems most agitated and ready to force issues. History gives us enough examples of different revolutionary paths that most general story lines have been written, even if specifics will vary significantly.

2) Outbursts of “revolutionary” energy often dissipate quickly. Coalitions of convenience and discontent don’t easily translate into coherent government and stable public order. Many are just along for the ride or are quickly disillusioned and return to the sidelines. Sicily and several parts of the Austrian Empire colorfully illustrated this in 1848. It’s much easier to critique and disrupt and much more challenging to articulate policies and gain widespread support (as the House GOP has regularly demonstrated recently in their own small way).

3) “Progress” is an illusion. 1848 saw great claims, excitement, and celebrations. Then not. Constitutions granted were revoked, newly-minted parliaments were disbanded, freed people were enslaved, and cultural changes stuttered. Steps forward do not inherently build on themselves; but sometimes, they do. This is particularly true over time. Narratives of progress—whether for the US, Europe/the “West,” or the world—are fine as history; but, as stock brokers all tell you: “past results are no guarantee of future performance.” Moreover, what counts for “progress” depends not only on one’s political predilections, but on digesting the actual results of past events. Things often don’t turn out the way their sponsors hoped.

4) Historical assessments depend on when they are being made. This is closely-tied to the last point. One way historians distinguish themselves from journalists is that the latter write while it’s far too early to tell what will happen. But even at some distance, assessments change and not just because of differing historiography. Early 1848 revolutionary jubilations were pretty much reversed by the following year. The dispersal of political power to the “lower” classes moved incrementally over the following century. The Austrian Empire remained intact for another twenty years, until the shock of a loss to the Prussians forced modest changes. France, too remained as a monarchy/empire until 1870 when the Prussians (again) knocked them over and a republic finally took root. In other places, social services, and the spread of the franchise moved incrementally and locally for decades. There was little of what we would recognize as full-on democracy until after WWI. Historians along the way (and through today) have talked about the “success” or “failure” of the Revolutions of ’48; but if we stop focusing on the initial spasm and stretch our view to a century; much of what the “revolutionaries” sought actually resulted. It all depends on when you ask the question.

These are not, I hasten to reiterate, “lessons of history.” Restating and interpreting (& reinterpreting!) the events of the past is what historians do, but projecting those past events into current or future situations is a game for mugs and pundits. Precedents make for plausibility and merely help the historian be “not surprised” by current events. It’s a long way from plausibility to prediction, or at least it should be.

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Hard Choices

2/9/2024

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For several years now, I have asked students in my Constitutional History class to write a very short essay to have them explore one angle of their philosophy on government and society. It’s partially an exercise in writing and advocacy, partially to get them to think in philosophic terms, and partially to get them to juxtapose two overlapping but not necessarily conflicting questions. Here’s the prompt:

There is a world in which the state claims and exercises the right to kill people after due process conviction for a crime; but no state official is ever killed.
There is a world in which the state disavows capital punishment, but state officials can and, sometimes, do get assassinated.
Which, in your view, is the better world? Where would you choose to live?

I tell them that fence-sitting is not acceptable; they have to pick one side. There is, of course, no “right answer; and I’ve seen a variety of responses and rationales over the years. I was struck with the responses from this year’s group and I’m looking forward to our discussion of their positions next week. While it’s typical that there is a slight leaning towards the second choice, this year was more sharply skewed in that direction. Moreover, what really hit me was the toleration/acceptance of public assassination in many responses. One clear sentiment was that the possibility of assassination would be a corrective to or punishment for public corruption and (implicitly) would improve the effectiveness and responsiveness of government. Indeed, in some papers, there was a sense that assassination could be justified for corruption or malfeasance.

More fundamentally, the responses seemed to be based on a deep disconnection with the idea that the government is representative of society and that society therefore has a stake in a stable and effective state (not to mention any virtue to be generically associated with public service). I suspect this reflects many young people’s disenchantment with how government works. Issues of discrimination, climate, bureaucratic inertia, and being captive of elites were part of many of these responses.

One issue implicit in this position is an acceptance of punishment without due process. Those who opted for the retention of the death penalty often stressed this aspect as limiting the downsides of the death penalty, but those who opposed the death penalty seemed to think that even if assassins were the opposite of “justice,” that the resulting deaths were an acceptable price to avoid the manifest injustice of how our society administers the death penalty. In addition, there was no expression of concern that assassination was, effectively, a random act, without any substantive connection with either the policies or integrity of the victim.

It's possible that the relative absence of political assassination in recent decades has made the concept seem abstract and distant from reality. Perhaps those of us who lived through two Kennedy assassinations and the shooting of Ronald Reagan inherently take a different view. While it seems that death threats against public officials are on the rise, few a publicized and fewer get to the point of action or prosecution and so are pretty much out of our consciousness. No one would have been surprised if there had been a serious attempt on the life of Obama or Trump, but there wasn’t and so our collective memory of the shock may have faded, especially for those who barely remember even the Trump years.

Still, rather than criticizing “today’s youth” for insensitivity and nihilism, it may be well to reflect on the world as they see it.

For one thing, the practical problems of the death penalty (most recently seen in Alabama last month), the clear racial disparities in the administration of justice in the US, as well as the well-recognized fundamental moral questions of state-sanctioned murder make this practice easy to reject. The relative rarity of the assassination of public officials reduces its apparent societal cost, so perhaps the trade-off is not so cut-and-dried.

Second, as I have noted previously, there are many reasons for despair among young folks today, often attributable to the inaction of government (at least as the instrument of a stultified, self-satisfied, and hypocritical society). I didn’t ask my students about “revolution,” (see next week’s posting), but I suspect that much of the same motivation that manifested in the answers to their assignment this week would show up in that context as well. They may be looking for some way to “shake things up,” and this discontent and frustration with the status quo may have emerged in their acceptance of the risk of assassination in these essays.

Now, my challenge in the classroom is to steer the focus back to history and, in particular, to the 18C and the challenges facing the country in the aftermath of the American Revolution. This class is about writing a constitution and the quandaries and trade-offs inherent in the essay assignment this week will be multiplied when they face the issues present in Philadelphia in 1787. How much they can maintain the rather different mindset of the (elite, White, male) Enlightenment world (as compared with the diversity of Californians born mostly in the 21C remains to be seen.

In the end, I’m heartened by the evidence of the struggle many of these students faced in responding to the prompt, regardless of their particular answers. It bodes well for the course and for them.

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Unspoken Assumptions

2/3/2024

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In one of the most insightful essays about the origins of WWI, the British historian James Joll wrote about the “Unspoken Assumptions” that underlaid the culture of fin-de-siecle Europe. He recognized that “When political leaders are faced with the necessity of taking decisions the outcome of which they cannot foresee, in crises which they do not wholly understand, they fall back on their own instinctive reactions, traditions and modes of behavior.” More specifically, he noted that British Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey undertook his understanding of international relations from his “highly principled, slightly priggish” upbringing. Or, how many leading military men readily took to heart the implications of a Darwinian/Huxleyian “survival of the fittest” mentality, which resonated with their professional outlook (which was cause and which was effect is impossible to parse). It’s an important insight and the absence of documentary support makes it speculative (and therefore questionable as History).

Still, Joll’s point is an important reminder to historians not to get too caught up in overt and material explanations, as well as to recognize the limits of written evidence when trying to assess the causes of human action. This stance is complementary to the point I made a few weeks ago (“All the Causes We Cannot See,” 120823) about how a focus on human agency blinds us to the physical environment within which people act. Similarly, trying to understand mentality (both individual or cultural) based on what is written, risks being superficial and doesn’t comport with what each of us knows about our own motivations and beliefs.

Historians are on much safer ground sticking to documents and data that are verifiable and can fit neatly into footnotes (although this is hardly insulated from critique and controversy). We’re not trained as psychologists and what commonly passes for psychological analysis and understanding is at least contestable, if not dubious. This is not, therefore, a call for any definitive long-distance diagnostics. It’s hard enough to understand someone with whom you’ve spent decades. Understanding “assumptions” and motivations in someone who grew up in another culture and another era is an order of magnitude more challenging. Many ears ago, I read “In Search of Nixon,” by the MIT History Prof. Bruce Mazlish. It was subtitled “A Psychohistory,” and struck me, even back then as more an experiment than a serious historical effort.

Pop psychology and Freudian knock-offs present further illusions. Did Hitler’s rejection by a Viennese art school spur his rejection of modern art once he was in a position to do something about it? How did the psychosexual insecurities of a certain recent former President affect his position on men with “little hands” or on women and their rights more broadly? How much did prior leaders and thinkers summarily dismiss the potential or ideas of a woman because of their sex?

But, at the same time, we can’t pretend that Joll’s unspoken assumptions don’t matter. There is a smattering of evidence that Kaiser Wilhelm II’s insecurities—both physical deformities and envy of this British cousins (he was Queen Victoria’s eldest Grandson, after all)—contributed to his brash diplomacy and Germany’s early 20C effort to compete with the British Royal Navy for maritime clout.

But, overall, a large amount of history is forever beyond the reach of archive/evidence-bound historians. In my own work on diplomatic history, I found correspondence from some far-flung representative back to the imperial capital to be a great repository of various actors’ intent. When, however, the ambassador went back to London and sat down with the Foreign Secretary, their oral conversation was rarely memorialized; so I had to infer/guess what was said. By the end of the 19C, the development of telephonic technology meant that even distant communication could happen orally and without a first-hand record. On the other hand, 20C bureaucratic practice has spawned a great volume of memoranda, documenting oral conversations and “water-cooler” chatter/decision-making. More recently, private instant messaging is designed to evaporate long before any historian could get their hands on it. “Private” correspondence and even personal diaries might be more candid, but even these are written with the expectation/fear of subsequent publication. And the more recent hyper-politicization of public discourse has increased the distance between what leaders say and what they mean, much less why they mean what they (don’t) say.

Regular readers of these commentaries have seen plenty of reasons to be wary of “History.” The “stories we choose to tell about the past” are selective, skewed, and incomplete. It’s both hard and fun to try to figure out “what actually happened.” We may fill in some gaps, come up with new analytical frameworks, and puncture old mythologies, but it’s good to recall how little we actually know.

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The World is Too Much With Us

These Revolutions Were Not Televised

Hard Choices

Unspoken Assumptions

Condemned to Repeat It --
Musings on history, society, and the world.

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The World is Too Much With Us

These Revolutions Were Not Televised

Hard Choices

Unspoken Assumptions

Condemned to Repeat It --Musings on history, society, and the world.

Archives

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Condemned to Repeat It --
Musings on history, society, and the world.