An Infinite Succession of Presents

pieter_bruegel_the_elder-_the_seven_deadly_sins_or_the_seven_vices_-_avarice
Pieter Bruegel the Elder, The Seven Deadly Sins

So much has changed in the texture of our cultural consciousness over the last six months. The underbelly of our collective thinking has gone ventral, exposing itself rather nakedly to all the world. In just my last 24 hour random walk through the “elite” media (you gotta love those conservatives designating my favorite channels of information with a specialized category all their own) I have encountered a plethora of exposés, quite unprecedented, on those anciently designated but ever present vices, the Seven Deadly Sins. A PBS special on greed. An article about shame in The Atlantic. An excellent neurobiological view of envy by the esteemed science writer Natalie Angier in the New York Times (which is posted on Slow Painting).

Not typical of our post modern culture milieu, this focus on the darker side of our natures is part of the reevaluation of what happened and how we got into the current disastrous state. Angier is kind enough to point out that other primates experience envy, but I doubt the chimp strain has the potential for rampant destruction that the human variety has.

From Angier’s article:

The new findings are preliminary, and some scientists have expressed reservations about what they or other scanning results from the fast-moving field of behavioral neuroscience really mean. Nevertheless, the research throws a spotlight on a potent emotion that we deny or deride but ignore at our peril. Much of the recent economic crisis, Dr. Smith suggested, may well have been fueled by runaway envy, as financiers competed to avoid the shame of being a “mere” millionaire.

Blame and bitterness is ambient these days, from conversations overheard at the hardware store to those we have at home. Who are the instigators, who are the greedy bastards that brought all of us so low? Bankers. Wall Street “idiots” (Claire McCaskill’s impassioned name calling actually seems tame compared to what I hear from neighbors and friends). The corrupt Cheney type politicos. The tiny oligarchy that really runs this country.

It’s a loaded issue—and one that comes with high personal cost— to spend time rounding up the likely suspects, just as it is costly for Obama to go after the atrocities committed by Bushists during the last 8 years. I don’t want to spend my valuable prana life force capital being angry and bitter just as Obama doesn’t want the much needed focus on rebuilding and repair to slip into retribution and revenge.

One of my favorite essays is by Howard Zinn, The Optimism of Uncertainty. Written in 2004, it is prescient on many levels for life in 2009. I have referred to it many times when discouragement feels like a strong tide that is relentlessly destroying the fragile sand of my beach head. I post it here in case you haven’t read it, since it may prove to be palliative for you too.

In this awful world where the efforts of caring people often pale in comparison to what is done by those who have power, how do I manage to stay involved and seemingly happy?

I am totally confident not that the world will get better, but that we should not give up the game before all the cards have been played. The metaphor is deliberate; life is a gamble. Not to play is to foreclose any chance of winning. To play, to act, is to create at least a possibility of changing the world.

There is a tendency to think that what we see in the present moment will continue. We forget how often we have been astonished by the sudden crumbling of institutions, by extraordinary changes in people’s thoughts, by unexpected eruptions of rebellion against tyrannies, by the quick collapse of systems of power that seemed invincible.

What leaps out from the history of the past hundred years is its utter unpredictability. A revolution to overthrow the czar of Russia, in that most sluggish of semi-feudal empires, not only startled the most advanced imperial powers but took Lenin himself by surprise and sent him rushing by train to Petrograd. Who would have predicted the bizarre shifts of World War II–the Nazi-Soviet pact (those embarrassing photos of von Ribbentrop and Molotov shaking hands), and the German Army rolling through Russia, apparently invincible, causing colossal casualties, being turned back at the gates of Leningrad, on the western edge of Moscow, in the streets of Stalingrad, followed by the defeat of the German army, with Hitler huddled in his Berlin bunker, waiting to die?

And then the postwar world, taking a shape no one could have drawn in advance: The Chinese Communist revolution, the tumultuous and violent Cultural Revolution, and then another turnabout, with post-Mao China renouncing its most fervently held ideas and institutions, making overtures to the West, cuddling up to capitalist enterprise, perplexing everyone.

No one foresaw the disintegration of the old Western empires happening so quickly after the war, or the odd array of societies that would be created in the newly independent nations, from the benign village socialism of Nyerere’s Tanzania to the madness of Idi Amin’s adjacent Uganda. Spain became an astonishment. I recall a veteran of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade telling me that he could not imagine Spanish Fascism being overthrown without another bloody war. But after Franco was gone, a parliamentary democracy came into being, open to Socialists, Communists, anarchists, everyone.

The end of World War II left two superpowers with their respective spheres of influence and control, vying for military and political power. Yet they were unable to control events, even in those parts of the world considered to be their respective spheres of influence. The failure of the Soviet Union to have its way in Afghanistan, its decision to withdraw after almost a decade of ugly intervention, was the most striking evidence that even the possession of thermonuclear weapons does not guarantee domination over a determined population. The United States has faced the same reality. It waged a full-scale war in lndochina, conducting the most brutal bombardment of a tiny peninsula in world history, and yet was forced to withdraw. In the headlines every day we see other instances of the failure of the presumably powerful over the presumably powerless, as in Brazil, where a grassroots movement of workers and the poor elected a new president pledged to fight destructive corporate power.

Looking at this catalogue of huge surprises, it’s clear that the struggle for justice should never be abandoned because of the apparent overwhelming power of those who have the guns and the money and who seem invincible in their determination to hold on to it. That apparent power has, again and again, proved vulnerable to human qualities less measurable than bombs and dollars: moral fervor, determination, unity, organization, sacrifice, wit, ingenuity, courage, patience–whether by blacks in Alabama and South Africa, peasants in El Salvador, Nicaragua and Vietnam, or workers and intellectuals in Poland, Hungary and the Soviet Union itself. No cold calculation of the balance of power need deter people who are persuaded that their cause is just.

I have tried hard to match my friends in their pessimism about the world (is it just my friends?), but I keep encountering people who, in spite of all the evidence of terrible things happening everywhere, give me hope. Especially young people, in whom the future rests. Wherever I go, I find such people. And beyond the handful of activists there seem to be hundreds, thousands, more who are open to unorthodox ideas. But they tend not to know of one another’s existence, and so, while they persist, they do so with the desperate patience of Sisyphus endlessly pushing that boulder up the mountain. I try to tell each group that it is not alone, and that the very people who are disheartened by the absence of a national movement are themselves proof of the potential for such a movement.

Revolutionary change does not come as one cataclysmic moment (beware of such moments!) but as an endless succession of surprises, moving zigzag toward a more decent society. We don’t have to engage in grand, heroic actions to participate in the process of change. Small acts, when multiplied by millions of people, can transform the world. Even when we don’t “win,” there is fun and fulfillment in the fact that we have been involved, with other good people, in something worthwhile. We need hope.

An optimist isn’t necessarily a blithe, slightly sappy whistler in the dark of our time. To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness. What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives. If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something. If we remember those times and places–and there are so many–where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction. And if we do act, in however small a way, we don’t have to wait for some grand utopian future. The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory.

9 Replies to “An Infinite Succession of Presents”

  1. Howard Zinn is one of my heroes and always speaks to my moral soul. Thank you for this. I will pass it to my children. I have always loved his tiny collection of essays, “Artists in Times of War,” which I’ve underlined all over.

  2. Of course we would share a love of local hero Howard Zinn. And it was this essay that induced me to buy every one of my children copies of a compilation of like-thinking essays called “The Impossible will Take a Little Time” that also includes this one by Zinn. It is a message I find that I need to read every day now that things are so bad. That, and the excerpt from The Four Quartets by T. S. Eliot:

    I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
    For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love,
    For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith
    But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.
    Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought;
    So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.

  3. Wow…I needed this today. THANKS…living with someone who is (or should I say “once was”?) in the banking industry has been all about waiting and optimism lately.

  4. We’re all in this together…

  5. Our mutual friend, Andy Kimball, led me to your website and I have been a regular reader for a few months now. It is time I acknowledge this and express gratitude to you. I especially enjoyed this day’s posting. I am a fan of Zinn’s, but had not read this essay. Very timely. As always he reminds us of the utility of the historical perspective. And of the importance of the generation now living, who have already resolved many issues that my generation insists on debating ad nauseam; ie, gay marriage. Zinn also reminds us of that very American (perhaps it is universal but I think not) belief in a human movement toward perfection. That makes this current economic contraction a forced reconsideration and an opportunity for us all to change direction. I find it a fascinating time to be alive, even though I am anxious.

  6. Janet, So good to get your comment, and thank you for contributing to the life of this blog. As is always the case, your take on things, whether delivered directly or by way of Andrew, is compelling and worthwhile.

    I am particularly uplifted by your last point, the “forced reconsideration” of the economic downturn. Wanting to live during “interesting” times is not for the faint of heart. Thank you for being a heroic example of how to hold that challenge.

  7. Never trust the media, especially as it reports on the recent trend in mea culpas. While it’s become fashionable to admit to wrongdoing, I find few reports of those who take responsibility for their actions & attempt to right the wrongs.

    The “underbelly of our collective thinking” is the greed that has driven American society for five decades, a society that looks down upon those of us who choose the helping professions, public service, education, etc. My wife & I sometimes regret raising our children to be caring & sympathetic adults: they are ill-prepared to prosper in our competitive culture.

    All the more reason for groups of like-minded individuals to support each other.

  8. MS, don’t you think that could state of things could change? The greed and selfishness has brought us all down so low I can’t help believing that those caring and sympathetic children we raised will be needed now more than ever. I just can’t give up on that possibility. As Howard Zinn says, if you don’t have hope, there isn’t any.

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