Recently I came across this piece on “grand strategy” in international affairs, and the author makes the point, which I’ve heard a lot of, in a lot of places, over the past two years, that things are really unsettled now. There’s a lot of interesting ideas swirling around about what international order should look like. There’s a lot of different visions of what the United States should do going forward. There are a number of contradictory accounts of what is happening in the world today, what the basic dynamics of change are, what is really going on.
Similar things can be said about domestic policy as well. Whatever “neoliberalism” is, or was, if it was anything, the Brookings Institution was one of its Horcruxes, but now it too has begun to talk not only about “neoliberalism” as a thing (which I’m still not entirely sold on) but also about how we need to get beyond it (and see also this).
For the first time in a century, there are serious American political figures who call themselves “socialists”. And the ideological electrical fences that has kept American politics hemmed in on both left and right for almost eighty years—to the right: “don’t be overtly racist”; to the left: “don’t be communist”—have collapsed. People are saying a lot of things that they wouldn’t have said out loud a decade ago (and others are freaking out about what they’re saying). In short, it feels like everything is up in the air.
Furthermore, we’re now confronting not only the collapse of old verities, but also recognizing new challenges that we never really imagined before. The past fifty years have been a time of us coming to grips with the idea that we’re changing the environment in basic ways. We may be developing technologies that threaten (or promise?) an end to work—which raises the question, which I suspect is more truly terrifying than we presently suspect, what will we do with our time? (My friend Jon Malesic is on this one, by the way.) Finally, though more subtly—and for now, in this post, more telegraphically—we’ve apparently decided now is a time to massively expand the “logics of recognition” and undertaken a “moral revolution” which is globalizing our moral concerns and also extending them to many different groups of people who were never objects of our direct moral concern before. (For the record, I think this is a good thing.) So: environment, labor, morality and egalitarian respect—all of them are up in the air as well.
We’ve been here, at least a little bit, before. Every once in a while, ideological verities collapse quickly, and people are left to make sense of what has happened. These are large, galactic changes, and happen rarely. Bliss it may be in those dawns to be alive, but it surely doesn’t always feel that way. In a way we are fortunate this time, for this normally happens only when there is a massively destructive war (or perhaps a plague, or some similarly wrenching event).
Many people think that the 1960s were disruptive, but that now looks more like a period when a lot of the world had some teen troubles. A more existentially riveting time was the 1940s. This summer, I skimmed through a book I had found out about by reading a review of it (reviews, and skimming—two great academic tricks), about the literature of the 1940s. Very quickly, I found myself going slower than I intended to, just because the book seemed so pertinent to today.
Moments like this are rare.