Everything Old is New Again

by Marie Snyder

We’re being asked to believe six impossible things before breakfast. We have to reckon with several  upheavals at once: more conflicts, discrimination, poverty, illness, and natural disasters than many of us have ever seen in our comfortable lifetimes, and without a clear path forward. It’s unsettling. It feels necessary to find courage for this disquieting time. I was recently reminded of Maya Angelou’s words, “Without courage, we cannot practice any other virtue with consistency. We can’t be kind, true, merciful, generous, or honest.” It might help to look back to stories of those who were able to maintain their integrity in the face of prior adversities as we manage this collective anxiety. 

Emile Durkheim wrote about this feeling back in 1897.  Suicide is a book-length report on the four scenarios that provoke people to give up on life: egoistic, altruistic, fatalistic, and anomic. His discussion of anomy may be a useful warning for today:

“Whenever serious readjustments take place in the social order, whether or not due to a sudden growth or to an unexpected catastrophe, men [referring to all people] are more inclined to self-destruction. …. Man’s characteristic privilege is that the bond he accepts is not physical but moral; that is, social. He is governed not by a material environment brutally imposed on him, but by a conscience. … But when society is disturbed by some painful crisis or by beneficent but abrupt transitions, it is momentarily incapable of exercising this influence. … Appetites, not being controlled by a public opinion become disoriented, no longer recognize the limits proper to them. … The state of de-regulation or anomy is thus further heightened by passions being less disciplined, precisely when they need more disciplining. … A thirst arises for novelties, unfamiliar pleasures, nameless sensations, all of which lose their savor once known. … What blinded him to himself was his expectation always to find further on the happiness he had so far missed. Now he is stopped in his tracks; from now on nothing remains behind or ahead of him to fix his gaze upon. … He cannot in the end escape the futility of an endless pursuit. … Time is required for the public conscience to reclassify men and things.”

Abrupt transitions make it hard to think. Some political figures recognize a crisis as an opportunity because the public isn’t thinking clearly. We go into survival mode and become more animalistic, unable to organize in order to stop questionable policies. We thirst for novelty, using distraction to cope with the upheaval. Time may be required, but what do we do if it feels like there’s a never ending urgent crisis presented, one after another? More clever commenters recognize them as planted distractions to keep us confused, but that doesn’t significantly negate their effectiveness.  

Durkheim was looking specifically at the effect of many changes in France from 1842 to 1869, but we might be more historically familiar with the upheaval that happened in the 1960s and 70s with civil rights and women’s right movements causing rapid change (well, things turned a corner after centuries of struggle) that left men directionless. When you’ve been raised and socially conditioned to find a woman to marry who’s “an angel in the kitchen, a lady in the living room, and a tiger in the bedroom,” then how do you relate to this new version of women as a person? How do you shift with the times while you’re still being taught that real men dominate? Many dug in their heels and refused to change, a resurgence of which is seen in current trends towards a “simpler” time, but many more worked towards a better relationship with the women in their lives. Social change never fully settles, and groups are more polarized than they have been in the recent past. 

Any transformation, detrimental or eventually beneficial, can destabilize a society: plague and war or innovation and fighting oppression. But it’s not just major events that are catalysts for anomy; the reemergence of old myths can also provoke this sense of foreboding. 

Durkheim came to mind as I listened to philosopher Jeffrey Andrew Barash recently give a talk from an excellent series on Historical Anxiety presented by Nicholas Halmi. Barash discussed our collective anxiety over myths from the past getting reactivated in the present. He explained how conventions can fade and history can turn a corner once there are no living members of a generation with direct recollection of events unless there’s an active effort at recall. He used the US civil war as an example: In the late 1860s, the North occupied the South to ensure Blacks were protected, and the KKK was dismantled. After soldiers left, the situation didn’t change; public discrimination wasn’t sanctioned legally or socially. But a generation later, in 1900, fragmented memories were turned into political mythologies to impose a new system that legalized discrimination. Thomas Dixon helped to develop the mythology with his book The Klansman, which presented an apology for white slave owners through the presentation of Black men ready to assault white women. Then his classmate, Woodrow Wilson, wrote A History of American People, and Dixon’s best friend, D.W. Griffith, put the ideas from both books into his film, Birth of a Nation. The NAACP boycotted theaters that showed it, but Wilson had private showings at the White House. Suddenly racism became socially acceptable again. By 1915, a new version of the KKK was formed that adopted ideas from the film, like burning crosses. It’s amazing how three well-connected buddies can shift an entire generation’s beliefs, and that was even before television existed. 

A generation later, in the mid-1930s, Margaret Mitchell portrayed the KKK sympathetically in her book Gone with the Wind just a year after W.E.B. DuBois helped to recover the passive presence of the historical past and contested this presented mythology by researching archives to write Black Reconstruction in America. Mitchell’s book became a film, and DuBois’ work was ignored until the 1950s and 60s when people began to take a more active interest in ideas that had been shoved to the margins. MLK pointed out that one of the myths generally accepted at the time was that civilization collapsed in the South because Black men had some political power, which archives show to be completely false. There’s currently a reawakening of nostalgia for the antebellum South in reversing their decision to re-name a school Stonewall Jackson, and now we’re seeing a nostalgic invocation of fascism. 

Barash explained that anxiety comes when we believe irrational ideas were completely vanquished, but then we see their resurgence. Anxiety is caused from the unexpectedness of a return of something that seemed resolved, from the ghost of a dead idea taking corporal form and wreaking havoc again. Now that we have the internet, we’re possibly more easily taken in by algorithms that narrow the focus of our searches and then prompt us to accept an AI summary instead of reading for ourselves. It might not be possible to bring evidenced moments back to the culture when everything is questioned as conspiracy, no matter how many scholars dig through archives and research to make well-produced TikToks. We might have to resort to explicit myth making if we can’t find ways to introduce pluralistic approaches to truth. 

We thought we were done with fascism. We already learned the lessons necessary to end all forms of discrimination. We know that women should have bodily autonomy, right?? And we know the necessity of keeping oil in the ground as much as possible. It’s demoralizing to watch the old ideas creep back into social consciousness. We are doomed to repeat the past. 

What happens if we no longer have truths because everything is up for debate from the flattening of our moral horizons that can make an unnerving action on stage provoke bland curiosity instead of outrage. We’ve lost solid ground to stand on, and climate adds yet another corner with a sharper edge. 

A few weeks ago, Roger Hallam wrote about an acquaintance’s explanation of how useful slavery was butting up against Hallam’s strong belief that everyone deserves basic human rights. He used the anecdote analogously to argue that, despite a lot of us believing we deserve luxury vacations, we have to stop flying. 

Buying a slave was a direct act of violence while, when you fly, the harm is indirect and the violence is not real. Slave owners used to have a similar argument. They said violence only applies to action by whites on whites, and so violence to blacks did not count. But how people see morality changes. … We have to realise that violence is violence regardless of whether it is direct or indirect. … People don’t know exactly who they will destroy, but they do know their action of emitting carbon will destroy innocent lives. This change in what we see as immoral is our next civilizational challenge. Just as in the past people had to understand that all people have basic rights, so we today have to understand that indirect harm violates those basic rights. … Given the level of violence that we are now inflicting by creating carbon emissions, 99% of the time flying has to be seen as being as unacceptable as owning a slave. To think otherwise is to hide behind your privilege, just as slave owners did, to avoid accepting that what you are doing is obscene.”

The entire culture has to evolve away from a capitalistic profit motive that hinges on speed, efficiency, and an achievement orientation that has spilled over from getting that promotion into displays of our collections of the best and brightest things and events, and move towards something much more collective, slower, and less accumulative if we hope to continue even just a few more generations. We’ve needed to do that for decades, pretty much since the rise of neoliberal capitalism of limitlessness and deregulation took hold. However, an old idea is emerging to undermine the present understanding of science and climate: “Drill, baby, drill.” 

Even the hardiest lot would be paralyzed to look to the future without any clear path to follow. We can learn from the early 1930s how people managed when jobs were scarce and seasonal, and how the government helped to save the day. We can learn from how people failed to prevent the atrocities when they saw signs in the late 30s, and we can look to how we managed to eradicate diseases in the past to fix our recent blunders. We’ve managed food shortages in the past, but only by moving food from one area to another. What happens when a tipping point of agricultural land stops producing? How do we keep building and re-building after storms destroy areas when we’re short on lumber? And what do we do as we watch leaders make some of the worst decisions for a sustainable future. In Ontario, we can’t seem to find any mechanism to stop Ford’s plans to pave over farmland and wetlands! Perhaps there’s some solace in Octavia Butler’s words: “The very act of trying to look ahead to discern possibilities and offer warnings is itself an act of hope.” 

Judith Butler explains, in What World is This?

“If we seek to repair the world or, indeed, the planet, then the world must be unshackled from the market economy that traffics and profits from its distribution of life and death. A politics of life … would be a critical reflection on the shared conditions of life for the purposes of realizing a more radical equality and honoring a nonviolent mandate of a global character. Perhaps this is a way to begin the world again, even as that world is already under way, to repair forward, as it were, as a new imaginary emerges from the hauntings of the present, the liminal horizon of this world.”

Distraction is one way to cope with it all, but another is action. Accepting that scientific inquiry can point us in the best direction while digging deep to find compassion for all of humanity is a start. Pretending this is normal will make it normal, and our current trajectory is disastrous. 

To borrow from James Baldwin, to be alive and “relatively conscious right now is to be in a state of rage almost, almost all the time. … It isn’t only what is happening to you, but it’s what’s happening all around you and all of the time in the face of the most extraordinary and criminal indifference.” Behind some of that rage is grief of lost possibilities begging to be acknowledged and fear of what’s coming next. Turning a corner while in a state of anomy means not succumbing, but developing the wherewithal to think, the courage to connect with others, and the compassion to be provoked to help.

Imagine a future with fewer things but a more inclusive and caring community, and consider what it would take to get there. Lots of people have written about what needs to happen politically and commercially to stave off disaster, but there’s a lot of room for ideas of what it will actually look like personally to live through it all. We need to imagine it before we can live it as we wade through a topsy-turvy world where ghosts of frightening beliefs are losing their transparency.