- BitsBlog - https://bitsblog.com -

The Long View

Megan McArdle: [1]

Ezra [2] and Brian are complaining that it’s hard to get anything done these days:

I think it’s almost certainly wrong that we’re not overwhelmed by the volume of tragedy in the world — there’d have to be something genuinely wrong with you to be able to absorb the current moment in some coherent way. So what many of us do is pick and choose. But once an issue is selected, there’s no real step two. Marching doesn’t work. Exhortations to write a letter or shoot an e-mail seem increasingly hoary, particularly as the process is taken over by organized pressure groups able to flood legislators with millions of e-mails. Volunteers are generally misused, and even when a campaign tries to construct a movement out of them, it can backfire, discrediting the whole enterprise (see Dean, Howard, and those $%*^*# orange beanies). The utter inadequacy of contemporary methods of protest and social action has been well established — it’s even been recast as narcisstic. As Martin writes:. . .

At the end of the day, there’s really one good option: Donating money. Possibly even raising it. And so political activism becomes indistinguishable from consumerism, and relies on funding other people’s ability to make a difference. Some groups, like Moveon, have done brilliant work at involving their small-time funders in the process, closing some of that gap. But the average campaign or cause is not nearly so innovative. And so most who want to be involved, who want to make a difference, are left writing a check, and never, themselves, feeling impactful.

First of all, the notion that this is some sort of uniquely horrible moment in world history is absurd. I grew up with the very real fear that one day, without much warning, I would simply vanish in a radioactive cloud. The fear of nuclear annihilation was the ever-present undercurrent to the lives of children living in major urban areas, or near military installations, in a way that you simply cannot comprehend unless you’ve lived it. Compared to the threat of global thermonuclear war, any of the world’s current problems, including climate change, are trivial.

With the exception of climate change–and even then, remember, it was already happening twenty years ago; we just didn’t see it–pretty much everything one can think of is better than ever. Wars are fewer, and kill fewer people. Everyone’s richer. Racism and xenophobia are bad, but not as bad as they used to be. Women have more freedom and opportunity than at any other moment in world history. Health care is better. Our teeth are cleaner, straighter, and less cavity-filled. We know more, do more, and enjoy more than human beings ever have before. I mean, things may look pretty grim compared to the three years at the end of the last millenium, but that’s life: you have good years, then you have less good years, then you have better years again.

But of course, people now in their early twenties don’t really remember anything before the late Clinton administration; no wonder everything seems like it’s going to hell in a handbasket. Their baseline is an unsustainable economic bubble in an unprecedented peacetime lull following the collapse of the Soviet Union.

With that one set of paragraphs, Megan explains to us why people as they grow older become more conservative politically speaking. They have, among other things, the benefit of the long view. (It seems strange to me personally to be speaking of 25 years as a long view, but there it is.)

It also speaks to me at least of a serious lack of the teaching of history… particularly, recent history. That, because one of the things that this points up to me is that the claim that things are going to hell in a handbasket by the younger crowd seems to me completely devoid of any accuracy when it tries to assess the direction we’re moving in. One needs to know where we were, before they can accurately judge where we’re going. And they clearly have no bloody clue where we’ve been.

This would seem to me, of necessity, to include the impact of our current situation in Iraq.  We have entire generations who have gotten used to the idea of having their problem solved within 48 minutes, (allowing for the standard set of commercials to break up the events ) where everyone gets to pack up and go home with smiles on their perfect faces, before the credits roll.

(Shrug) Some of the blame, certainly, can be laid on the Hollywood crowd , television, and so on.  But how much of the blame for this lack of a long view, can be laid on our educational system , which has been almost systematically the last twenty years or so removing what it teaches about history ?  As an example of what I’m talking about, the British educational system, has decided to remove Winston Churchill from its history courses?  Consider the depth of that transition; We’re talking about the pivotal individual in the British empire for the whole of the twentieth century.  There are American examples, as well.  We have discussed them here often enough for you to know what I’m talking about.

Is the solution for the lack of the long view the removal of education from the purview of government?