A New Year. A New Decade? How About a New Century??

We can all agree that we have just entered a new year – even if January 1 is as arbitrary as any other date as a marker for the year. Purists will insist that 2011 is the beginning of the New Decade, but why quibble about that either. It is irritating, however, to have people declare that ten years ago we entered a new century, and that this new century of ours is markedly different from the previous one. In fact, despite the drama of 9/11, we in North America are living in the old century. The twentieth century, as I see it, began with the Great War in 1914. More than any previous century, it has been marked by totalities, including total war, i. e., wars that recruit the hearts and minds and bodies and lives of whole populations. It has been a century in which the victory of large-scale capitalism has been made complete. The laissez-faire capitalism of the 1920s -- despite being rescued and temporarily modified in the Great Depression – was to be repeated in the rise of the super-corporation in the 1950s, and then pushed to the rarified heights of near religion with the neo-liberal capitalist victories from 1980 to the present. After 1914, matters ranging from war to cold war to medicine to business also resulted in the near total victory of science over all others ways of resolving and knowing. In the backlash against the modernity of warfare and science and consumerism after 1914, we also saw a new kind of religious reaction (I cannot in good faith call it conservatism), beginning with the publication and widespread circulation of the “The Fundamentals” in the early part of the 20^th century followed by frequent religious revivals culminating in the new giants of religion in the likes of Oral Roberts, Jerry Falwell, and John Hagee.

Unable to break, or even modify, the effects and cycle of the perfect storms created by these elemental features of the 20^th century, we have increasingly come to be their victims. We have come to live in a world where ideologies and other loose systems of thought and behavior have long ago expanded beyond their original essence and their public utility. These systems and behaviors have become distentions – overwhelming, often grotesque, sometimes even caricatures of some decent value or morality that they once represented. I was fortunate enough to have taken a course in philosophy of history from Bill Bossenbrook, a distinguished professor who first alerted me to the nature of distentions. A recent article by Tony Judt – “What Is Living and What Is Dead in Social Democracy?” – in the New York Review of Books, Vol. LVI, No. 20, has further prodded me to address the business of distentions and the seemingly perpetual century we seem unable to escape. I will not repeat Judt’s argument, although I have long held some of his opinions. I differ with him here in the elements upon which I want to focus. He halls out the usual suspects: capitalism, socialism, communism, etc. I am going to identify a different set of “isms” to highlight how I think “distentions” have distorted and made pathological our quest for social democracy and social justice.

In order to drive home the matter of distention, here are four “isms” that are not (yet) part of our ordinary vocabulary, and why I think they keep us mired in an inappropriate past and an unworkable present.

1. “Economism” – As Judt points out, “economism” does not simply mean narrow economic determinism, although it encompasses that, too. Economism for Judt is “the invocation of economics in all discussions of public affairs.” It is, in short, a kind of economic totalitarianism. Decades ago, June started saying, “When did we stop talking about the needs of society and start talking about the needs of only the economy?” I don’t know. I do know that in many western countries we have shoved the idea of society to the background (at best) and elevated the supposed health of the economy to the very forefront of all public (and, for that matter, private) considerations. We have become servants of an economy that is much more ineffable and fictitious than those mere members of society who must slavishly tend and feed it. Among the worst consequences has been the near total victory of the idea of the trickle-down theory of economic well-being for everyone who is not a part of the financial “industry” or big business. What is so astounding is that trickle-down economic prosperity has been shown to be false in every single historical case where it has been broadly applied. We who live in North America live in societies “of the economy, for the economy, and by the economy.”

2. “Religionism” – The ameliorative effects of religion -- which make us more empathetic creatures and generally expand our humanness – are lost in the distentions of religionism. As Marx observed long ago (in his best philosophical work), religion can cause alienation – alienation from the societies we inhabit on earth as well as alienation from ourselves as full human beings. Some modern evangelical movements have, by their vigorous adherence to certitudes, created further social alienation. A siege mentality in which exclusive groups of the “saved” or the “righteous” need no longer care about the mundane, earthly lives of their fellow human beings, is not a healthy thing for a planet of 6 billion people. Yet we have large masses of people who have turned their backs to temporal society, expending their time trying to calculate the exact date of the rapture.

3. “Familyism” – Yes, I was also surprised to find this word had a meaning (to at least some people). As I understand it, some attach it to a movement associated with Senator Patrick Moynihan – his ideas on poverty, I assume -- that elevate the importance of the family and the maintenance of its strength above other social factors. This is all good in that healthy families lead to a healthy society. But we have, in the last thirty years at least, made family the be-all-and-end-all of life. Whether Margaret Thatcher actually said that “there is no such thing as society; there are only individuals and families,” is perhaps less important than the fact that many have acted on this precept. “We’re all right, Jack” is the saying that comes to my mind, not just in the realm of those who have succeeded economically but with those living in what they think are secure families. Like those entrapped in “religionism,” “familyism” includes a few, and exclues many. Or, in other words, the “family isn’t everything, it is the only thing” (to paraphrase Vince Lombardi’s famous words about winning in football). Even those with close friends and neighbours are more wont to erect the barricades of family than seek more broadly-based social reform. The world has grown to condemn ethnocentrism, but familyism is just ethnocentrism with a smaller circumference. Ironically, while modern science has done much to eradicate racist and ethnocentric arguments, it has inadvertently, through the promotion of ideas like “selfish genes” and the biological necessity of parents protecting their offspring before all else, promoted not only the primacy of the family but the family’s right to prior claims in all societal areas.

4. “Sciencism” – “Sciencism,” despite being antipathetic to “religionism,” is its mirror image. Sciencism is simply the belief that science will, given enough time, answer all questions and resolve all matters. There are many more adherents to this naïve belief than some may realize. Almost no form of public activity can claim authenticity without passing scientific standards. Science is the gate keeper and its near total victory can be seen in almost any modern university one wishes to inspect. Post-modernist resistance has been isolated and restricted to a few English departments and unemployed poets. Even the disciplines of History and Philosophy now claim that they are completely scientific. When I suggest to my friends that poetry might be a source of enlightenment and truth, I am given a look of condescension and amusement. The arts and literature, after all, are decorative. When I further suggest that devotees of “sciencism” would do well to reflect on irony, I am told that science will unravel all ironies as well.

It should come as no surprise to anyone, therefore, that the long 20^th century has been, and remains into the 21^st century, a totalitarian one. It did not end with Hitler and Stalin and Pol Pot and Saddam Hussein. It hardly needed, or needs, villains of this type to carry it forward. We will all quietly acquiesce in one totalitarian belief or another. Of course, there have been strenuous movements aside from post-modernism that have tried to offer alternatives. Those who retreated to the land and formed small, self-sufficient communities were not as crazy as we thought in the 1960s. Those who have tried to enhance small-scale capitalism among industrious women in Bangladesh or Africa have resurrected the idea of capitalism as a social benefit just as Adam Smith envisioned it. Missionaries and Humanists who try to encourage the dignity of all human beings, have had an ameliorative effect worldwide. But until we break the iron grip of the “isms” I describe above – not destroy those parts of them that are good and valuable but the totalitarian qualities they flaunt – we will not move on to another “historical” century or a better world.