We are the Unhistorical Generation

In the final days of the Cold War, not long after the fall of the Berlin Wall, an American political theorist by the name of Francis Fukuyama published an article in a moderately prestigious foreign affairs journal titled ‘The End of History.’ It was the sort of article that people who know about things without knowing about anything in particular were very enthusiastic about, and its popularity no doubt endures on undergraduate syllabuses for the sort of classes that you can spend a semester in only to conclude that the course description with all the adjectives in quotation marks and no nouns was in fact less vague than the course itself.

But I digress. The point, and by that I mean what Fukuyama was getting at in his article, is that History Is Over. Of course, he doesn’t mean that things have stopped happening, but he does mean that interesting things have stopped happening.

Now naturally you will object that plenty of interesting things have happened since 1989. There were two Gulf Wars, 9-11, two rather nasty recessions, Bill Clinton did something to someone that seriously impugns his ability to stop someone in the Balkans from doing something to someone in the Balkans, NAFTA, Avatar, the Giants won the World Series, and so it goes. Well it’s not a bad objection, but more on that later, before you start getting all objectionable let me tell you why History Is Over.

The basic idea is that all human history up to this point has been a seething ideological conflict just sort of bubbling away until the chaff of backwards ignorance boils away leaving us with Democracy/Capitalism. Tribalism, Feudalism, Royalism, Fascism, Communism, all fall by the wayside, the struggle is won and the world is now safe for the best of all possible worlds, namely liberal democracy and the free market. Once you’ve got a Capitalist Democracy and all of the attendant rights and entitlements there is simply no going back. Everyone pretty much gets along and buys things and we don’t really want that to change. History from this point will no longer be about things changing, if anything happens at all, things will be the same and become more so.

This isn’t to say that there won’t be problems. There are going to be Iraqs and Irans, sex scandals and the occasional Kim Jong Il, but Democracies and Market Economies have been popping up all over the world ever since the Original Thirteen opened up the maiden shop and started franchising and they’ll keep popping until every last reluctant obstructionist dreg of the primitive and deluded ideologies which proceeded our obviously superior way of doing things has been swept into the rubbish bin of history.

‘History’ will become a term of abuse for the rubbish heap of prototypes and beta versions of people, ideas and lifestyles that never made it out of R&R. The Greeks, the Romans, European, Chinese and Indian empires, all no better than errors in the cosmic game of trial and error that has led us faithfully onward and upward to our heavenly resting place in Democracy American Style.

But be that as it may, whether Fukuyama is right or not is beside the point. The fact that some Neo-Con hung up the ‘Mission Accomplished’ banner a bit early is not what interests me. The grain of intrigue here is that, ‘End of History’ or no ‘End of History,’ a distinctly twilight of the world pallor seems to hang in the air. Apocalyptic speculation hasn’t been so rampant since 1945, and the best that most people can say about the global political situation is ‘I dunno, stalemate I guess.’ Call it anomie, ennui, apathy, disappointment, disillusionment, depression, despair or simple indifference, the temptation seems to be to call it a world and be done with it.

Whether Fukuyama was, against all odds, a prophet of our time, a modern Zarathustra throwing over the idol of ‘things could be different than they are, maybe even better,’ whether our metastasised egos have finally throttled our better angels, or whether disenchantment with the revolutionary ways of the Beats, Hippies, Abolitionists, Communists, Utopians, Suffragettes and our parents who have been pouring out of the woodwork since 1776 with harebrained schemes for building a better world has finally dripped into the nether-regions of our collective psyche, whatever the reasons for it, the present generation seems oddly convinced that while they can make the world a better place, they will not make it a different place.

But you object. ‘Well my good man, your conniving sophistical subtleties notwithstanding, I,’ you say, ‘am not convinced that there is a problem here. In fact, I am not convinced that you’ve said anything at all. Your argument, to the extent that I can discern an argument here, seems to be entirely based on a dimly understood article from the eighties and a series of irrelevant distinctions in vocabulary and verb tense that, I confess, are all Greek to me. My honest opinion, dear sir, is that if you have a point to make, make it. And throw in an example by way of illustration, why don’t you!’

Well, that was quite the indelicate intrusion into the flow of my thoughts, dear reader, but if you insist, and it seems you are adamant, I will answer your objection as best I can.

My point is that insofar as History is conceived of as a dynamic battle of ideologies, the sustained questioning of the way we live and why, supported by a genuine willingness to try radically different patterns of thought and action, particularly vis a vis our basic assumptions about life the universe and everything, I suspect, based on my rather provisional membership in modern human society, that we as a culture are no longer playing that game. I’ll emphasise that this is really no better than a hunch, but as I see it, the great creative uncertainty that brought us the clash of Religion and Science, Democracy and Totalitarianism, Capitalism and Communism, is no longer alive in the [Post]-Post-Modern soul. To say nothing of what may actually happen, and I do say nothing on that subject, we are a decidedly Unhistorical generation.

Barring climatic or nuclear catastrophe, I wouldn’t be terribly surprised if the historians of the future look on the end of the Cold War in much the same way we look on the Fall of the Roman Empire; the last interesting thing to happen for a good long while.

Post I

I hate technology. I condescend to texting and occasionally to email, largely because the one reminds me, rather quaintly I admit, or a sort of direct automatic telegraph, and the other is far easier and more reliable than typing out a letter on my Remington and posting it. (It is also far cheaper; the price of stamps just broke 50 cents, USPS having come to the economical conclusion that the best remedy for a total lack of demand is to raise prices. But that’s the postal service for you: doing the unnecessary inefficiently since Xerxes was on the throne.)

As for the rest of it, I am firmly convinced, and experience continues to bear out the view, that the Internet, Facebook, Twitter, and cetera, self-select for all that is base, stupid and perverse in human nature, to the emphatic exclusion of the nobler sentiments and/or anything creative, authentic or worthwhile. ‘They used to say that a million monkeys pounding away at a million typewriters would eventually come up with the complete works of Shakespeare; now thanks to the Internet we know that is not true.’

Blogs, the medium through which I now talk to myself in what will soon become a dusty, cobweb ridden and perennially unvisited corner of the indelible historical record, are if anything even worse. As I see it, they cater on the one hand to the would-be pop culture icons who feel that their no doubt fascinating and completely original lives deserve the level of attention society pays to a Lindsey Lohan or a Hurricane Katrina, and on the other hand to the would-be demagogues who feel that their no doubt moderate and well-reasoned socio-political views deserve the sort of adoring audiences society provides for a Huey Long or an Adolph Hitler.

Given the nature of the Internet, all of this fevered activity should draw easy and obvious parallels to those other institutions now synonymous with wrong-headed communicative failure (High Schools, the Senate, Italy) with everyone shouting and no one listening, the result can only be truckloads of useless and in retrospect embarrassing term papers, red-tape and Italians that we’ve resolved to ignore until they go away. Sadly the Blogosphere (someone has decided that the Blogo-world is circular, presumably to match the logic that sustains it) has proven more enduring then the problems of the kind that we’ve traditionally faced, it cannot be burned or forgotten, and all attempts to distract it with Boobs have backfired horrifically.

To be fair, there are of course plenty of good blogs out there, and the Internet is full of useful information and even, I admit, valuable original work, and I have nothing but respect for those almost Nietzschean aberrations that have managed to heave themselves, half-dead and crusted in faecal matter from the malarial swamp of a marketplace to which our culture comes to trade, gossip, sicken and die.

Of course, I anticipate your obvious and by this point assuredly outraged question: ‘What the hell are you doing writing a blog you hypocritical Ludite?! If you want to express your inflammatory views to an indifferent audience, go write a book lamenting the Decline of Western Culture or the Ignorance of the Masses, or better yet, go write for the New York Times, surely that’s the place for widely-held minority opinions and unsubstantiated cultural commentary with an elitist tilt and a progressive thrust!’

Hmm. I seem to have forgotten why my straw man is wrong.

Ah, yes! I was going to answer the question. Why has an avowedly technophobic enemy of mass culture decided to throw his hat into the already over-populous ring of amateur authors and armchair cultural critics who spend their free time transcribing their indolent observations and tacking them up online in the vain hope that somebody might give a damn? It seems that some sort of Statement of Principles or Declaration of Intent is in order.

In the first place, despite my unsympathetic appraisal of modern culture and my firm belief that not just the state of things, but the sort of people who generally talk about the state of things has been looking pretty damn shabby lo these past 30 or 40 years, I believe that there are still people out there who are saying important and insightful things, some of them even going so far as to say them on the Internet, and while I don’t necessarily claim to be one of these people myself, I do hope to be able to bring some of their ideas together with older, largely forgotten ideas in new and useful ways, and generally bring attention to the ragged rear-guard of the civilised world, and possibly have a bit of fun while doing it.

In the second place – and I warn you now that I am about to make an Unsolicited Disclosure of Personal Information – I’ve reached a point in my life where it will be either the Blog or the Bottle for me. Confronted with the classic problem of Artists, Intellectuals, Sensitive Souls and those like myself burdened by the particular conceit of secretly believing to be one of the above, ‘Do you make something of your life or do you drink it away as quickly and painlessly as possible?’, I have decided to take the former path insofar as it will have me. That said, given my personal weakness for Jackson Pollock’s double or nothing school of artistic philosophy, you will probably be right in expecting the occasional drunk screed for or against something something something, or not, etc.

And finally, in the third place, though I may wax vitriolic at times (often with more venom than I honestly feel), the reason that I like to think and write about the world and people and the things they do and books and such, is that I genuinely find them interesting and exciting, and perhaps there are others who do too. The world, our hearts, and our psyches, may be full to their inky bottoms with quite a lot of plastic, prefab shit, one-size-fits-all ideas, emotions and desires made en masse in China for a firm in Milwaukee, but there are also a lot of beautiful, wonderful things out there or in there, and I’d like to do my bit to expose the one and elevate the other.