Turn, Turn, Turn

By Jason Segedy

April 16, 2020

If you've ever read William Strauss & Neil Howe's work on generations, you might recall that much of it centers on how society changes in a prolonged period of crisis.

The word “crisis” is one that is prone to overuse and abuse.  There are many things nowadays that are described by politicians or activists as a “crisis” - often for utilitarian or politically-expedient reasons.  People frequently disagree about the severity or the urgency of these alleged crises, and often argue over whether they are things that we need concern ourselves with at all.  

But every so often events unfold in such a way that the Crisis is unmistakable, pervasive, all-consuming, and of undeniable importance to every member of the society.  There are sure to be vigorous disagreements over how to handle this type of Crisis, but there will be no arguments about whether or not it is, in fact, a Crisis.  

Previous Crisis events in American history, such as the American Revolution, the Civil War, and the Great Depression/Second World War rose to this level of absolute importance.  These were times when the future and the fate of the nation and its people truly hung in the balance. 

With the onset of this global pandemic, and the untold number of severe social and economic disruptions that are sure to follow in its wake, it is almost certain that we have entered into such an era - a Crisis - with a capital “C”.  For the vast majority of us, this will be the first and only Crisis of this type in our lifetime.

Crises of this sort are not just bumps in the road that must be navigated around.  They are world-altering events that reshape and dramatically refocus all of society’s institutions.  They change the balance of power between the rights of the individual and the well-being of the group.  They have life-changing and lifelong effects on every single person.  They are inescapable manifestations of an iron reality that cannot be explained away, spun away, or ignored.  They demand, and will receive, our undivided attention.

A cornerstone of Strauss and Howe’s work is that a person’s age at the time that a Crisis of this sort occurs is an important variable in terms of how they respond to events, and how their responses, in turn, shape subsequent events.  

Each person belongs to a generation composed of chronological peers who tend to share broadly similar characteristics based on the way that society’s social and cultural institutions (e.g. family, government, religion, business, education, media, etc.) shaped them at various stages of their lives.    

Some people reject the validity of viewing society through a generational lens altogether.  But I think that this is a mistake.  I think that it is extremely difficult to argue that the time in which one is born does not shape one’s general view of the world.  

We live, after all, in a world of both time and space.  Each generation has its virtues as well as its vices.  Each generation tends to overcorrect for the excesses and the errors of its predecessors.  We are finite and mortal beings, with limited temporal perspective.  We tend to discount, or even despise, the hard-won wisdom of our forebears.     

The idea here is not that everyone in a given generation thinks the same thing, or reacts to events the same way, or that the generation into which you were born is the most important thing about you.  But it seems to me rather obvious that our location in time is one of many factors that shapes who we are.    

People experience the various stages of life (childhood, young adulthood, middle-age, elderhood, and old age) differently, depending upon the era in which they were born.  Some people were children during eras in which children were underprotected, while others were overprotected.  Some people were young adults during eras of strong social conformity, while others were young adults during periods of hedonistic individualism.  Some people were middle-aged in times of peace and prosperity; others in times of hardship and scarcity.  

During a Crisis, each generational cohort (elders, the middle-aged, young adults, children) brings its life-experiences to the Crisis and plays a role in how society responds to it.

Conversely, each generational cohort is shaped and altered (the young more than the old) as a consequence of the Crisis.  A good example of this is that many people who were children during the Great Depression remain thrifty and prepared for scarcity to this very day, no matter how prosperous they ultimately became.  The lessons of that childhood event were etched indelibly into their psyches.  

One of the most important historical dynamics identified by Strauss and Howe is that, over the course of one long human lifetime, society tends to move through four distinct phases in which institutions strengthen or weaken, and in which individualism waxes or wanes, as the availability of (and demand for) social order rises or falls.  

The first phase, which comes on the heels of the previous Crisis, is a High.  Our most recent example would be the period between the end of World War II and the assassination of JFK.  This was an era in which both the availability of and the demand for social order was high.  Institutions were strong and individualism was weak.  It was a time in which people believed that it was important to coalesce, conform, and build for the future.   

The second phase is an Awakening.  Our most recent example would be the period bookended by presidencies of LBJ and Ronald Reagan.  This was an era in which the availability of social order was high, but the demand for it was low.  People were tired of the social conformity of the Eisenhower era, and of the way that the interests of individuals and minorities were being subsumed by those of the majority.  As a result, individualism began to strengthen and institutions began to be discredited and to weaken.  This was an era in which people believed that it was important to atomize, loosen the reins, and enjoy the present.   

The third phase is an Unraveling.  Our most recent example would be the period between the Reagan-era and the Great Recession.  This was an era in which both the demand for and supply of social order was low. The society's focus was increasingly on the inner-world of the individual and not on the outer-world of the community.  While individual freedom and rights continued to expand in the social realm, significant problems began emerging in the economic and political realm.  Institutions that were built up during the previous crisis of the Great Depression and World War II continued to atrophy and decay, and were now weak and widely distrusted. 

The fourth and final phase is a Crisis.  The Crisis is not a single event, but a gradual series of events and systemic problems that become progressively more difficult to ignore, and which culminate in a catalytic event that becomes impossible to avoid, dismiss, or explain away.  The demand for social order is now high, but the supply is still low.  It is at this point that people recognize that society’s focus must shift from the inner-world of the individual to the outer-world of the community, and long-dysfunctional and discredited institutions finally begin to strengthen, and are ultimately rebuilt.

A long period of social unraveling is all that many of us have ever experienced - one in which ever-worsening social, political, and economic problems are ignored and kicked further and further down the road.  The pandemic has made ignoring them impossible.  

This Crisis era began with the Great Recession (or perhaps even 9/11) and has become unmistakable with the arrival of this pandemic, and with the yet unknowable social and economic upheaval that is certain to follow.

There is nothing mystical about this process.  It is not that a Crisis just magically appears, as if on cue.  It is rather that societies where institutions are weak; where people are used to a high-degree of personal autonomy; where the well-being of the individual is valued far above that of the group, are extremely vulnerable and unprepared when an unforeseeable and catastrophic event comes along. 

At another time and in a different place, the pandemic might have been an equally terrible and tragic event, but one that occurred when individuals and the institutions that they have created were up to the task of taking the collective actions necessary to manage it in a much more capable and competent way.  But we don’t live in that time and place.    

So, an event which might have manifested itself as a fearsome dragon to be slain, becomes an even deadlier and more elusive multi-headed hydra, because society is uniquely unprepared for it.  

It ultimately doesn’t really matter whether or not you buy-into Strauss & Howe’s sociological theories.  Their ideas are certainly not true for all places and all times, and they do not make this claim to begin with.  The important thing about their work is that it provides a framework for understanding the relationship between the individual and society, and for anticipating how people and the institutions that they create are both shaped by, and, in turn, shape events.

We have forgotten the lessons of the past.  We will learn them the hard way, just as the people who lived through the 1930s and 1940s learned theirs.  That Crisis happened one long human lifetime ago.  Virtually everyone who was an adult then is now dead, and their wisdom is lost to us forever. 

Crises of the sort that we are embarking upon tend to stop previous and familiar trends (an all-consuming individualism, a dearth of social order and community cohesion, pervasive institutional rot) in their tracks.  As the crisis wears on, they will begin to reverse.  The supply of social cohesion and order is still low, but the demand for it is now high.

Things that were previously celebrated or at least tolerated as normal (celebrity worship, CEO greed, billion-dollar publicly-funded stadiums, millionaire college football coaches, extreme income inequality) may increasingly begin to be viewed by the public as grotesque or even perverse - relics of a recent, but now dead and irrelevant past.

Trends that pundits, prognosticators, political scientists, economists, and urban planners were predicting (or guaranteeing) six short weeks ago could be a dead letter.  Social and economic forces that once seemed inexorable may sputter out, cease altogether, and begin to reverse at an astonishing speed.  

Ideas and public policies that were once considered unthinkable (both good and bad - and I'll let you decide what those are) will now not only be thinkable, but will be actively pursued and implemented, with rapidly increasing popular support, in the face of hardship. 

As Mark Twain reportedly said, “history doesn't repeat itself, but it often rhymes.” The previous stanza in this poem was the Great Depression and the Second World War.

I have no idea what the future holds.  But it is possible to make some educated guesses. 

I am guessing that we are going to see less globalization and more nationalism.  I would bet on more collectivism and less individualism.

I am guessing that however disruptive you imagine this pandemic will be to our way of life, you are probably still underestimating it.  There are dozens of social and economic dominoes that have yet to fall that we cannot envision yet.  

That there will be much hardship and human suffering probably goes without saying.  In the long-run, there may even be good that comes out of all of this disruption and heartache, but what that might look like is impossible to know right now. 

The ability to adjust one’s expectations to the realities of this crisis will become increasingly important as each day passes.  People who are unable to think different thoughts from those that they thought six weeks ago are likely to be at a distinct disadvantage.

Life will go on, and we will get through this, but it is going to be very different for a long time.  You and I are living through a world-altering event of the highest magnitude.     

In terms of the urban planning and policy implications of what we are living through, I think that we are going to be having a depression, not a recession.  I believe that under any possible scenario a lot of people in this country are going to be a lot poorer, and that a lot of people who have never been poor before will be now.  I think that any urban planning or policy work that does not assume this to be the case is missing the plot.  

I will be happy to be wrong about all of this.

Living Well in the Face of Coronavirus, Climate Change and Other Potential Disasters

By Jason Segedy

February 24, 2020

If you spend any amount of time on social media following the news, you may have noticed that much of the discussion and coverage is geared toward generating tremendous fear and anxiety about a wide variety of horrifying ways that we (as individuals), and our civilization (as a whole) could meet an untimely and unexpected death.

This is nothing new.  Back in 1948, in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, which culminated in the dropping of the atomic bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki; and just as the Cold War was getting underway, C.S. Lewis wrote an essay entitled On Living in an Atomic Age.  You can read it at the bottom of this post.

In it, Lewis reminds us of something that those of us living our materially-comfortable and fairly predictable modern lives have tended to forget - at least until the latest virus, or environmental disaster, or weapon of war intrudes upon our somnolence - the fact that we are a doomed race living on a doomed planet in a doomed universe.  Neither the invention of the atomic bomb nor the discovery of some new microbe has changed that grim fact one iota.

This essay is as relevant today as it was 72 years ago.  Today, it could just as easily be renamed On Living in an Age of Climate Change or On Living in an Age of Coronavirus; or the original title could remain, since (spolier alert) the threat of nuclear destruction has never gone away.

As Aldous Huxley famously said:  “the knowledge that every ambition is doomed to frustration at the hands of a skeleton [has] never prevented the majority of human beings from behaving as though death were no more than an unfounded rumor.”

Lewis’ essay is a prime example of the maxim that people need to be reminded more often than they need to be instructed.  We need to be reminded of the kind of universe that we are actually living in.

Many people in the West today, both the educated and the uneducated, hold to a personal philosophy of life that is functional and utilitarian but logically inconsistent: a blend of progressivism (belief in endless human progress); techno-utopianism; neo-marxism; modernism; post-modernism; narcissism; atheism; philosophical materialism; and scientism (as opposed to science).  

This convoluted and self-contradictory stew of beliefs simultaneously holds that at bottom, we (our thoughts and our very consciousness) are no more than the sum of our biochemical and physical parts, and that our actions are (by the inescapable logic of philosophical materialism) simply nothing more than the products of mindless and purposeless collisions of subatomic particles and electrical impulses in our brains which give us the illusion of free will, consciousness, and self-hood itself.  

Human beings, like the rest of the world, are material objects, through and through; they have no soul or ego or self of any immaterial sort.

Yet, at the same time, they believe that we, even as accidental products of this mindless and exclusively material universe, still possess individual objective dignity and worth, have intrinsic human rights, and are part of a mysterious and cosmic evolutionary process that goes far beyond basic biological evolution; which strives and has purposes and is moving toward some final state or goal that represents real and objective progress over the state that we are currently in.  

Although we are insignificant specks of atomic stardust, we somehow rose up out of the primordial muck and mire and are now indispensable participants in a drama which will culminate in something that represents real and lasting progress.  Weak and diminutive bipeds that we once were; we are perhaps haltingly, but inexorably, on our way to becoming the masters of the universe and the makers of worlds. 

Even as intelligent and vaunted an atheist and believer in philosophical materialism as Richard Dawkins is unable to avoid smuggling in nods to meaning and purpose, despite (given his dogmatic belief in materialism) all evidence to the contrary:

Millions of people, just like Dawkins, continue to believe in human dignity, progress, meaning, and transcendence while simultaneously holding to a materialist philosophy which leaves absolutely no room for any of those things.  

Given philosophical materialism, what you do ultimately makes no difference.  All human plans, hopes, dreams, and loves will come to nothing in the end, when the sun goes supernova, the universe collapses in upon itself, all atomic particles cease their motion, and all matter (which is all there is, and which is all “we” are, anyway) reaches absolute zero.

As Lewis points out below:

So, the ultimate question is not whether humanity will be wiped out by a plague, by climate change, or by nuclear weapons.  One way or the other, it is inevitable that our race and the universe that we inhabit will perish.  

Whether it happens today, tomorrow, or a million years from now, of course, concerns us as individuals.  But the worry that a virus, or climate change, or nuclear destruction is prematurely and tragically ending something that ever had any real future hope of going anywhere must be dispensed with entirely.

The question that Lewis is asking us to consider is whether nature is all that exists.  The answer to that question, and that question alone, will determine whether the answers to our other questions have any ultimate significance.  

I believe in science.  It teaches me that all of this will come to nothing in the end.  It gives me no reason whatsoever for optimism about the future of our universe and those who inhabit it.

But I also believe in Christianity.  It teaches me that in this world we will have great trouble, but that God has overcome and will ultimately redeem it.  It gives me every reason for hope about the future of our universe and those who inhabit it.

You can read the essay below, or listen to it here:

On Living in an Atomic Age

By C.S. Lewis

In one way we think a great deal too much of the atomic bomb. “How are we to live in an atomic age?” I am tempted to reply: “Why, as you would have lived in the sixteenth century when the plague visited London almost every year, or as you would have lived in a Viking age when raiders from Scandinavia might land and cut your throat any night; or, indeed, as you are already living in an age of cancer, an age of syphilis, an age of paralysis, an age of air raids, an age of railway accidents, an age of motor accidents.” 

In other words, do not let us begin by exaggerating the novelty of our situation. Believe me, dear sir or madam, you and all whom you love were already sentenced to death before the atomic bomb was invented: and quite a high percentage of us were going to die in unpleasant ways. We had, indeed, one very great advantage over our ancestors - anaesthetics; but we have that still. It is perfectly ridiculous to go about whimpering and drawing long faces because the scientists have added one more chance of painful and premature death to a world which already bristled with such chances and in which, death itself was not a chance at all, but a certainty. 

This is the first point to be made: and the first action to be taken is to pull ourselves together. If we are all going to be destroyed by an atomic bomb, let that bomb when it comes find us doing sensible and human things - praying, working, teaching, reading, listening to music, bathing the children, playing tennis, chatting to our friends over a pint and a game of darts - not huddled together like frightened sheep and thinking about bombs. They may break our bodies (a microbe can do that) but they need not dominate our minds. 

“But,” you reply, “it is not death - not even painful and premature death - that we are bothering about. Of course, the chance of that is not new. What is new is that the atomic bomb may finally and totally destroy civilization itself. The lights may be put out forever.” 

This brings us much nearer to the real point; but let me try to make clear exactly what I think that point is. What were your views about the ultimate future of civilization before the atomic bomb appeared on the scene? What did you think all this effort of humanity was to come to in the end? The real answer is known to almost everyone who has even a smattering of science; yet, oddly enough, it is hardly ever mentioned. And the real answer, almost beyond doubt, is that with or without atomic bombs, the whole story is going to end in NOTHING. The astronomers hold out no hope that this planet is going to be permanently inhabitable. The physicists hold out no hope that organic life is going to be a permanent possibility in any part of the material universe. Not only this earth, but the whole show, all the suns of space, are to run down. Nature is a sinking ship. Bergson talks about the elan vital, and Mr. Shaw talks about the “Life-force” as if they could surge on for ever and ever. But that comes of concentrating on biology and ignoring the other sciences. There is really no such hope. Nature does not, in the long run, favour life. If Nature is all that exists - in other words, if there is no God and no life of some quite different sort somewhere outside Nature - then all stories will end in the same way: in a universe from which all life is banished without possibility of return. It will have been an accidental flicker, and there will be no one even to remember it. No doubt atomic bombs may cut its duration on this present planet shorter than it might have been; but the whole thing, even if it lasted for billions of years, must be so infinitesimally short in relation to the oceans of dead time which precede and follow it that I cannot feel excited about its curtailment. 

What the wars and the weather (are we in for another of those periodic ice ages?) and the atomic bomb have really done is to remind us forcibly of the sort of world we are living in and which, during the prosperous period before 1914, we were beginning to forget. And this reminder is, so far as it goes, a good thing. We have been waked from a pretty dream, and now we can begin to talk about realities. 

We see at once (when we have been waked) that the important question is not whether an atomic bomb is going to obliterate “civilization”. The important question is whether “Nature” - the thing studied by the sciences - is the only thing in existence. Because if you answer yes to the second question, then the first question only amounts to asking whether the inevitable frustration of all human activities may be hurried on by our own action instead of coming at its natural time. That is, of course, a question that concerns us very much. Even on a ship which will certainly sink sooner or later, the news that the boiler might blow up now would not be heard with indifference by anyone. But those who knew that the ship was sinking in any case would not, I think, be quite so desperately excited as those who had forgotten this fact, and were vaguely imagining that it might arrive somewhere.

It is, then, on the second question that we really need to make up our minds. And let us begin by supposing that Nature is all that exists. Let us suppose that nothing ever has existed or ever will exist except this meaningless play of atoms in space and time: that by a series of hundredth chances it has (regrettably) produced things like ourselves - conscious beings who now know that their own consciousness is an accidental result of the whole meaningless process and is therefore itself meaningless, though to us (alas!) it feels significant.

In this situation there are, I think, three things one might do:

(1) You might commit suicide. Nature which has (blindly, accidentally) given me for my torment this consciousness which demands meaning and value in a universe that offers neither, has luckily also given me the means of getting rid of it. I return the unwelcome gift. I will be fooled no longer.

(2) You might decide simply to have as good a time as possible. The universe is a universe of nonsense, but since you are here, grab what you can. Unfortunately, however, there is, on these terms, so very little left to grab - only the coarsest sensual pleasures. You can’t, except in the lowest animal sense, be in love with a girl if you know (and keep on remembering) that all the beauties both of her person and of her character are a momentary and accidental pattern produced by the collision of atoms, and that your own response to them is only a sort of psychic phosphorescence arising from the behaviour of your genes. You can’t go on getting any very serious pleasure from music if you know and remember that its air of significance is a pure illusion, that you like it only because your nervous system is irrationally conditioned to like it. You may still, in the lowest sense, have a “good time”; but just in so far as it becomes very good, just in so far as it ever threatens to push you on from cold sensuality into real warmth and enthusiasm and joy, so far you will be forced to feel the hopeless disharmony between your own emotions and the universe in which you really live.

(3) You may defy the universe. You may say, “Let it be irrational, I am not. Let it be merciless, I will have mercy. By whatever curious chance it has produced me, now that I am here I will live according to human values. I know the universe will win in the end, but what is that to me? I will go down fighting. Amid all this wastefulness I will persevere; amid all this competition, I will make sacrifices. Be damned to the universe!”

I suppose that most of us, in fact, while we remain materialists, adopt a more or less uneasy alternation between the second and the third attitude. And although the third is incomparably the better (it is, for instance, much more likely to “preserve civilization”), both really shipwreck on the same rock. That rock - the disharmony between our own hearts and Nature - is obvious in the second. The third seems to avoid the rock by accepting disharmony from the outset and defying it. But it will not really work. In it, you hold up our own human standards against the idiocy of the universe. That is, we talk as if our own standards were something outside of the universe which can be contrasted with it; as if we could judge the universe by some standard borrowed from another source. But if (as we were supposing) Nature - the space-time-matter system - is the only thing in existence, then of course there can be no other source for our standards. They must, like everything else, be the unintended and meaningless outcome of blind forces. Far from being a light from beyond Nature whereby Nature can be judged, they are only the way in which anthropoids of our species feel when the atoms under their own skulls get into certain states - those states being produced by causes quite irrational, unhuman, and non-moral. Thus the very ground on which we defy Nature crumbles under our feet. The standard we are applying is tainted at the source. If our standards are derived from this meaningless universe they must be as meaningless as it.

For most modern people, I think, thoughts of this kind have to be gone through before the opposite view can get a fair hearing. All Naturalism leads us to this in the end - to a quite final and hopeless discord between what our minds claim to be and what they really must be if Naturalism is true. They claim to be spirit; that is, to be reason, perceiving universal intellectual principles and universal moral laws and possessing free will. But if Naturalism is true they must in reality be merely arrangements of atoms in skulls, coming about by irrational causation. We never think a thought because it is true, only because blind Nature forces us to think it. We never do an act because it is right, only because blind Nature forces us to do it. It is when one has faced this preposterous conclusion that one is at last ready to listen to the voice that whispers: “But suppose we really are spirits? Suppose we are not the offspring of Nature. . .?”

For, really, the Naturalistic conclusion is unbelievable. For one thing, it is only through trusting our own minds that we have come to know Nature herself. If Nature when fully known seems to teach us (that is, if the sciences teach us) that our own minds are chance arrangements of atoms, then there must have been some mistake; for if that were so, then the sciences themselves would be chance arrangements of atoms and we should have no reason for believing in them. There is only one way to avoid this deadlock. We must go back to a much earlier view. We must simply accept it that we are spirits, free and rational beings, at present inhabiting an irrational universe, and must draw the conclusion that we are not derived from it. We are strangers here. We come from somewhere else. Nature is not the only thing that exists. There is “another world”, and that is where we come from. And that explains why we do not feel at home here. A fish feels at home in the water. If we “belonged here” we should feel at home here. All that we say about “Nature red in tooth and claw”, about death and time and mutability, all our half-amused, half-bashful attitude to our own bodies, is quite inexplicable on the theory that we are simply natural creatures. If this world is the only world, how did we come to find its laws either so dreadful or so comic? If there is no straight line elsewhere, how did we discover that Nature’s line is crooked?

But what, then, is Nature, and how do we come to be imprisoned in a system so alien to us? Oddly enough, the question becomes much less sinister the moment one realizes that Nature is not all. Mistaken for our mother, she is terrifying and even abominable. But if she is only our sister - if she and we have a common Creator - if she is our sparring partner - then the situation is quite tolerable. Perhaps we are not here as prisoners but as colonists: only consider what we have done already to the dog, the horse, or the daffodil. She is indeed a rough playfellow. There are elements of evil in her. To explain that would carry us far back: I should have to speak of Powers and Principalities and all that would seem to a modern reader most mythological. This is not the place, nor do these questions come first. It is enough to say here that Nature, like us but in her different way, is much alienated from her Creator, though in her, as in us, gleams of the old beauty remain. But they are not there to be worshiped but to be enjoyed. She has nothing to teach us. It is our business to live by our own law not by hers: to follow, in private or in public life, the law of love and temperance even when they seem to be suicidal, and not the law of competition and grab, even when they seem to be necessary to our survival. For it is part of our spiritual law never to put survival first: not even the survival of our species. We must resolutely train ourselves to feel that the survival of Man on this Earth, much more of our own nation or culture or class, is not worth having unless it can be had by honourable and merciful means. 

The sacrifice is not so great as it seems. Nothing is more likely to destroy a species or a nation than a determination to survive at all costs. Those who care for something else more than civilization are the only people by whom civilization is at all likely to be preserved. Those who want Heaven most have served Earth best. Those who love Man less than God do most for Man. 

Book Review: Chris Arnade’s “Dignity”

By Jason Segedy

January 6, 2020

Occasionally I read a book that helps me to see things that I knew intuitively to be true, but couldn’t articulate properly, and consequently helps me to have a better understanding of the cultural world that we inhabit.

Chris Arnade’s Dignity is one of those books.  

Why?  

It is partly the stories that he tells.

The stories in this book are poignant – often humorous, and just as often heartbreaking.  You cannot read more than a few pages in this book without reading about poverty, or racism, or – most omnipresently - drugs, and the terrible things that addiction has done to people and to the places that they live.  

It is partly the photos.  

The photos, like the stories, are poignant.  Some of them are heartwarming, while, again, others are heartbreaking.  All of them are compelling, beautifully composed, and masterfully produced.  The complexity and the humanity of the people who are depicted in them comes through in ways that many similar photographs seem unable to capture.

It is partly the writing.  

This book is very readable.  Arnade is a fluid, crisp, and efficient writer.  He is not given over to long expostulations or flowery turns-of-phrase.  The writing is a sort of journalism that we seldom encounter nowadays – prosaic, without seeming detached or clinical; sympathetic, without seeming overly-sentimental.  

But, more than anything, what has helped me is the framework that this book provides for understanding today’s America.  

Before I get into all of that, allow me to briefly describe who Chris Arnade is and how he got to the place where he wrote this book.

After two decades of working on Wall Street as a bond trader, Arnade grew dissatisfied with his line of work, particularly in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis:

He began taking long walks from his Brooklyn neighborhood - sometimes as long as 15 miles - to reduce stress, and to explore the parts of New York City that many people describe as dangerous or uninteresting – places like Hunts Point in the South Bronx.  

Arnade began to carry his camera on these walks, talking to anyone who would talk to him, and with their permission, would photograph them and their surroundings.

This process of interacting with flesh-and-blood people, rather than flickering images on a computer screen, ultimately caused Arnade to wrestle with who he was and where he was going:

Ultimately Arnade quit his job and began driving all over the country – racking up 150,000 miles on his car over a three year period, and visiting a broad and culturally diverse cross-section of this nation.

As he describes in great detail, he saw how messy life is - all too often filled with pain, injustice, and problems too big for any public policy regime to truly address.  

But he also saw how resilient people can be, and how community can thrive in the most unlikely of places (like McDonald’s) amidst the pain and poverty.  In a word, he found what many people would find most unlikely in stigmatized places full of marginalized people – dignity.

The framework that Chris Arnade articulates through stories, photos, and commentary focuses on three things:

·        The front row/back row dynamic

·        The enduring importance of place in a spatially-agnostic world

·        The power of non-credentialed forms of meaning

I’ll cover the three of them in order:

First, the front-row/back-row dynamic is a powerful lens for viewing our present moment in time.  Arnade’s metaphor, as you have probably already guessed, takes us back to grade school – where the high-achievers, go-getters, and social extraverts sat in the front row of the class; while the kids of whom little was expected lingered unnoticed in the back.

The United States has always been a country that has tried its damndest to avoid acknowledging the reality of social class.  Our meritocracy (which is both real and imagined) has much to offer, but one of its real shortcomings is an inability to grapple with social class.  When we Americans do occasionally think about social class, we always tend to think that it is simply about how much money that one makes.  

But class is about far more than that.  It’s not just about annual income – it’s also about net worth (and the insulation from sudden financial disaster that comes with it); occupation and profession (do your back or your knees hurt at the end of the workday?); and educational attainment (did you graduate from college; and, if so, where did you go to school?)

Paul Fussell, in his book, Class: A Guide Through the American Status System, identifies nine social classes:  Top Out-of-Sight; Upper; Upper Middle; Middle; High-Proletarian; Mid-Proletarian; Low-Proletarian; Destitute; Bottom Out-of-Sight.  The first three are clearly the front row, while the last five are clearly the back row.  “Middle” is just that – a way-station between the front row and the back row, and a place that not as many people as we would like to believe pass through.

But beyond income, net worth, occupation, and educational attainment, there is one overriding thing that separates the front row from the back row:  cultural power.  

Cultural power is the power to define reality.  The front row makes the rules.  It decides what is important and what is not.  It decides who is important and who is not.  It decides which places matter, and which ones don’t.

The back row might greatly outnumber the front row, but that doesn’t matter.

The front row has cultural power, and it is a type of power that is self-replicating and self-reinforcing.  It is about who sets the agenda, who decides what will be discussed (and on which terms), what is cool or politically correct; and conversely, what is uncool or politically incorrect.

It is the type of power that is wielded by the insiders in both political parties, by the people who run major for-profit and non-profit institutions, by the people who control the media; and by the upper middle and middle class functionaries who serve and/or benefit from the status quo created by those insiders and the organizations that they oversee.

McDonald’s looms quite large in this book, and it is a great example of an institution that (while a corporate creation of the front row) is very much looked down upon by those in the front row, while being simultaneously embraced and beloved by those in the back row.  

Like many of us in the front row, Arnade had always thought of McDonald’s as a place to be avoided, or joked about, or perhaps visited to “slum it” just for fun. What he realized time and again on his journeys is that for those in the back row, McDonald’s is a place to socialize; to get satisfying cheap food; to get clean water; to charge a phone; and to get free Wi-Fi.  

In short, a place that you and I sitting in the front row might see as a soulless corporation that is part of the problem; many people in the back row see as a low barrier-to-entry community center where they will be accepted, and where they can get simple things that they need without having to follow a bunch of seemingly arbitrary rules, or navigating a big, faceless bureaucracy.

Second, Arnade does a wonderful job of explaining the enduring importance of place to a world that is increasingly spatially agnostic, and often actively privileges certain front row places over back row ones.    

But, as he points out, even in the centers of front row cultural power like New York, Washington, and Los Angeles, there are plenty of back row places.  The South Bronx, Anacostia, and South Central are only a short drive away from the Upper East Side, Capitol Hill, and Brentwood.

And then there are the vast stretches of America where virtually every place is composed of people in the back row – small places like Portsmouth, Ohio; Cairo, Illinois; and Selma, Alabama; as well as larger places like Bakersfield, California; Gary, Indiana; the north side of Milwaukee; and the east side of Cleveland.

Chris Arnade firmly rejects what I call “The U-Haul School of Public Policy”.  His writing about place is honest, realistic, and often profound:

Finally, Arnade discusses what he calls “non-credentialed forms of meaning” – things like family, faith, place, and race.  These are all things that you inherit without having to do anything:      

Arnade’s writing about religion, like his writing about place, is moving, and impressed me more than anything else in this book.  

He writes about religious faith with a degree of honesty, respect, and authenticity that I almost never encounter in an age where dismissive and infantile rejoinders about “the Flying Spaghetti Monster” are taken by some of the world’s leading intellectuals to be the final word on a philosophical debate about the existence of God that is as old as humanity itself.  

He describes faith and religious people in the complex and realistic way that I know them to actually be in real life, not in the two-dimensional caricatures that people in the front row so often use to dismiss them:

Many of the people that Arnade writes about – homeless people, drug addicts, and prostitutes - are people whose religious beliefs and life experiences are nuanced in ways that many people in the front row would have a difficult time understanding.  

They are people whose hardships, trials, and tribulations have helped them to see truths about life that many of us with comfortable lives have trouble seeing.  

As C.S. Lewis said:

Arnade continues:

Reading Dignity put this often antiquated-sounding passage (with its talk of temples, Pharisees, and tax collectors) from the Gospel of Luke (and one that I’ve read dozens of times) into a fresh, contemporary light:

Chris Arnade doesn’t have a six-point plan for fixing what is wrong with America. This book isn’t a white paper describing an innovative new public policy framework. Some reviewers have (quite unfairly) criticized Arnade for this.

But they are missing the point of this book.  Thinking that there is "a plan" for fixing this is exactly what someone in the front row would think.  I should know, because I'm one of them.  We always think there should be a plan.  And we always expect someone in the front row like Arnade to come up with one.

Yes, it should go without saying that the economic divergence between people and places is having social and political ramifications that are becoming impossible to ignore.  And yes, we need to think, and think hard, about how to fix that.

But the purpose of Dignity is not to offer policy solutions.  It is to listen, learn, understand, and document what is happening to back row America.

The listening, learning, and understanding must come before any policy solutions can be proffered.  

And whether any of us like it or not, we need to recognize that “policy solutions” may be of limited or little use.  Many of the challenges and problems that Arnade is documenting are social, cultural, and even spiritual – and they are deeply complex. They do not easily lend themselves to a tweak of a legislative dial here, or the pull of a policy lever there.

The economic and cultural gutting of Portsmouth, Ohio, or of the east side of Cleveland, was decades in the making, as each fall of a socioeconomic domino knocked down many others.  

Data and statistics, important as they often are, never tell the entire story about a place.  

If we are to hope to help these places and the people living in them, we first need to get to know them as people.  

People like us.  

People with dignity.

I have the utmost respect for Chris Arnade.  In addition to the pleasure of having read his book, I have had the fortune to interact with him every now and then on Twitter.  He is a thoroughly decent person.  He was willing and able to acknowledge his own imperfections, and he decided to get out and begin to do something about them.  

I have learned a lot from his example.  His book has helped me to see my own selfishness and narrowness more clearly, and to think hard about what it might mean for me to be a better person.

I hope that you will take the time to read his book, and to look at his photographs. The people and the places that he depicts are worthy of your consideration.

The U-Haul School of Urban Policy

By Jason Segedy

January 7, 2019

I’m going to say it three times at the beginning of this post.  Even so, people will read this (or won’t) and will argue that this is what I’m saying.

Here is what I am arguing:

Too many urban policy people reflexively make the simplistic argument “people just need to move to where the jobs are”, without thinking it through.  They overestimate the benefits and the upside of such a move, and they underestimate the costs and the downside.

As economic inequality grows between people and places, this argument is being made with increasing regularity, and is proffered as something that will benefit the working class.  

But it is not typically an argument that is made by working class people.  It is an argument that is made by highly-educated upper middle class people, who often do achieve greater success by relocating, and who often unthinkingly assume that since they and most of the people they know moved away and achieved greater success, then everyone else can too.

High-paying jobs and economic opportunity are increasingly clustered in a handful of (mostly coastal) metropolitan areas.  The thinking goes that “well, the jobs and opportunities are here, and the people who need them are there, so these people simply need to move from where they are to where the jobs are, and voila - problem solved.”

I know that most people really don’t believe that it is quite that simple, but this is how what I call the “U-Haul School of Urban Policy”, espoused (rather uncharitably) by people like Kevin D. Williamson, comes across in the popular press.

But the more that I read (even the most sophisticated and charitable versions of) the argument, the more skeptical I become.

The argument seems to be:

1) Person who needs economic opportunity lives in a place without much of it.

2) Person therefore moves to a place with more economic opportunity.

3) ???

4) Success!

I’m going to go ahead and repeat myself:

Moving away from the place that you live can be a great idea.  This country was built on that idea - many of our forebears were immigrants who left kith and kin behind and built a new life here in America.  

Similarly, our own American history is largely the story of vast internal migrations for economic opportunity: the homesteaders settling the Great Plains; the Okies leaving the Dust Bowl and heading for California; and the white Appalachians and black Southerners who left the forests and farms behind and made their way to the foundries and factories of the Great Lakes region.

But, I would like to suggest that things are fundamentally different today.  Many pundits have bemoaned the fact that Americans are simply not as mobile as they used to be.  So why is this?  Are they just lazy and stupid?  Or is there something more going on?

I think there is something more going on.  I don’t think the situation of, say, an unemployed machinist in Canton, Ohio is completely analogous to that same person’s grandfather who moved from West Virginia to Canton.

Why?

Here are several reasons:

1) The Skills Gap - In past migrations, it was nearly always the case that vast numbers of unskilled* people moved from a place without enough unskilled work to a place with an abundance of unskilled work.  The Okie who was a farmer in the dusty Great Plains became a farmer in the dusty Central Valley.  The white West Virginian, or the black Alabaman who did a repetitive job in a mine or on a farm that required a strong back and little formal education, now did a similar job in a factory in Akron or Detroit.   

The situation today is simply different.  Many of the jobs that are being created now, particularly the “Creative Class” jobs in the national centers of finance, media, arts & entertainment, science & technology, and government (and all of its related private-sector support industries), are simply not available or accessible to the people who need jobs today.  They lack the skills, the training, and the education.  Moving won’t, in itself, solve any of that.      

The root of the problem is not that people are immobile.  The root of the problem is not that working class people are stupid or lazy (although there are significant social challenges faced by working class families, that I’ll address later).  It’s that we are not creating enough working class jobs that pay a living wage.  We’re not creating them in Detroit, and we’re not creating them in San Jose.  

Half of the population will always have an IQ that is below 100.  Half of the population will always have less than the median level of education. In keeping with the Pareto distribution, 80% of the population will always be better suited by temperament and personality to do structured, somewhat repetitive, low risk/low reward work for someone else, rather than unstructured, nebulous, high risk/high reward work with a lot of personal autonomy.  Whether any of us like it or not, this is the reality of human biology, psychology, and sociology.  

Most people will be followers, rather than leaders.  Most people will not get an advanced degree.  Most people want (and need) a relatively simple job that pays enough to support their family, and provides a reasonable quality of life.  

2) Cost of Living - The discrepancy in the cost of living between American cities today is huge.  Even if we accept the premise that working class people in rural Pennsylvania are going to need to move to Silicon Valley, or Washington, D.C., because that’s where the jobs are, and even if we accept that they will get themselves qualified to do those jobs (or at least can get decent jobs in the bustling service economy that supports all of those tech gurus and public policy wonks), where are they going to live?  

It is expensive to move across the country.  This is something that highly-educated white collar people with adequate disposable income (or credit) might take for granted, but the cost of moving, alone, is a real hardship for working class people.  Everything is expensive in a city like San Francisco, New York, or Washington, D.C. - the rent, the food, the taxes.  

The cost of living is not an insurmountable obstacle for people toward the bottom of the income distribution (people can move to distant suburbs where rents are lower, etc.), but it is a real barrier.  In a large coastal metro, the places with the lowest rents also tend to have the worst access to public transit.  

A move to a more economically prosperous region, with a much higher cost of living isn’t automatically a slam dunk for a native-born working class person, particularly if they lack the social safety net of either robust networks of colleagues, or extended family and community connections, that many upper middle class people, and many immigrants possess.

3) Social and Family Connections - Today, working class people, in particular, are facing massive challenges in terms of disintegrating family structures, social cohesion, and dependable and binding connections to other people.  Charles Murray, in his book Coming Apart, has documented in painstaking sociological detail, the ways that working class white households have fallen behind middle and upper middle class households over the past 50 years, in terms of markers of social cohesion like civic participation, marriage and family stability, economic well-being, religiosity, and vocational success.  Working class people have increasingly succumbed to a variety of social pathologies - addiction, crime, serial no-commitment relationships producing children, and voluntary unemployment, which are collectively both cause and effect of weakening family structures.  Many people in struggling families and communities have only a few remaining stable ties to family and friends.  Many single mothers, for example, depend on their own parents to care for their young children while they work, rather than paying for day care that they cannot afford.  It is a lot to ask them to leave these few sources of emotional and social support behind, in the hopes of rolling the dice and finding a better economic future in a strange place.

4) The Enduring Importance of Place - Today’s economic inequality is not just made manifest simply by a wide gap between households, but by a widening gap between urban places.  Previous large migrations of lower-income people in this country were almost always rural-to-rural or rural-to-urban migrations, rather than urban-to-urban migrations*.  When people left behind small communities in Appalachia or the rural South, in order to improve their individual economic prospects, it was undoubtedly a hardship for the people who were left behind in those places, but the number of people who were impacted was relatively small.  

That obscure, old, abandoned silver mining town in the Colorado mountains that you can’t name might have been a one-industry town, just like Youngstown was, but the similarity ends there.

Whether we’re talking about a smaller city like Flint or Youngstown, or a larger one like Cleveland or Detroit, we’re looking at established places with tens or hundreds of thousands of residents, surrounded by hundreds of thousands or millions more. The critical mass of people, and economic activity, even in a massively shrinking city like Youngstown, is staggering.

The notion that large numbers of people can just walk away from larger urban regions in the Rust Belt, without disastrous social (and, increasingly, political) implications is naive in the extreme.  Encouraging everyone to abandon their friends, family, and community, and head for greener pastures might be a solid course of action for an individual person or household, but it is suicidal as a regional economic development strategy.  It is also a recipe for social and political disintegration.

Even after tens of thousands of the best and the brightest have left, these cities will not be disappearing.  The rest of the population, now poorer and more uneducated, and the place, with its worsening problems, will remain.      

As Alan Mallach says:

Epilogue

In case I haven’t said it enough:  

But, I am arguing that we need a better answer than “You need U-Haul” for the economically struggling people in the cities of the vast post-industrial heartland of this troubled nation.  As a public policy response, even the most sophisticated versions of this argument are naive, simplistic, and incomplete.  

We need better jobs for the vast majority of the population that is not ultra-ambitious, is risk-averse, and will never get an advanced education or training.  We need to rethink our current priors regarding trade, technology, and automation.  We need to question the process of creative destruction, when the reinvention that it promises does not materialize.

We need to refocus national, state, and local economic development policy to adopt a place-based orientation - one that recognizes that people need stability, order, and community.  Expecting everyone to be a rugged individualist and an economic free agent who is willing to uproot their family and move to a new place whenever their corporate overlords tell them that they must, simply runs counter to human nature.  Life is a delicate balance between order and chaos.  There is such a thing as too much order.  But there is also such a thing as too much chaos.  We ignore that reality at our peril.

Over the past 20 years, the Libertarian consensus in the upper echelons of both political parties has won out, and has made peace with the idea that the economic future of the country will mean the destruction of local economies, more spatial inequality, and the continued hollowing-out of most legacy communities, as wealth and opportunity continue to filter from these places to just a handful of superstar cities, and from urban neighborhoods in the core to the outer suburbs on the periphery.

The people in government and business that run this country want you to accept that all of this is just the way it is.  You shouldn’t.  And neither should they.  

Because it won’t go on like this forever.  For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. Right or wrong, for good or for bad, when you leave enough of the country out of the new economic dispensation there are going to be social and political consequences. 

This is the stuff that revolutions are made of.  Most people didn’t expect Brexit.  Most people didn’t expect Donald Trump.  Most people didn’t expect that people wearing goofy yellow vests would be burning things in Paris.  But here we are.

If you want a balanced, intelligent, good read on the extreme complexity of this issue, please read Alec MacGillis’ wonderful piece, Forced to Choose Between a Job and a Community.

Evil

By Jason Segedy

November 5, 2018

The above photo is of the crematorium at Dachau. I took it in March 1987.

Some people don’t believe in God.  They do not believe that there is an ultimate standard of “right” and “wrong” uncreated by humans, but discoverable by humans, to which we all have an obligation, and which we ought to obey.  The notion of an actual Moral Law, given by an external Lawgiver is increasingly seen as obsolete.

Instead, many decent, modern, well-educated people believe that what we call “good” and “evil” are ultimately social constructs.  They believe that these concepts developed over time, as modern humans emerged and diverged from our primate forebears, because they have evolutionary survival value, and ensure the smooth functioning of society.  They believe that “right” and “wrong” are useful concepts, and help us to ensure the greatest good for the greatest number of people, but that they are not an objectively true standard of morality. 

This view of morality sounds credible at first blush, particularly in the abstract.  But, upon further reflection, and in the face of monstrous, real-world examples of what most of us would call “horrific evil”, like the Holocaust, it raises several questions:

Survival value for whom?  

The smooth functioning of which type of society?  

What if what the greatest number of people call the “greatest good” happens to be cruel, unjust, and harmful (or even fatal) to the minority?

Furthermore, many decent, modern, well-educated people believe that we (our thoughts and our very consciousness) are no more than the sum of our biochemical and physical parts.  They believe that our actions are, by the inescapable logic of Darwinist Materialism, simply nothing more than the products of mindless collisions of subatomic particles and electrical impulses in our brains that merely give us the illusion of free will.  They believe that human beings, like the rest of the world, are material objects, through and through; they have no soul or ego or self of any immaterial sort.

But if there is no such thing as an ultimate, objectively true standard of “good” and “evil”, and if we are all just purposeless bundles of atoms, following our biological imperatives in a blind, pitiless, indifferent universe, how can we condemn the perpetrators of the Holocaust for doing what their genes predestined them to do?  Or for doing what they perversely saw as seeking the greatest good for the greatest number of people in their society?

We could criticize them for violating our own personal sensibilities, by being sadistic and cruel; and perhaps judge them for acting in ways antithetical to what we determine to be the greater good of humanity writ-large.  

But could we condemn their actions as truly, objectively wrong?  Could we call what they did evil?

As you may have already surmised, I believe that we can, and that we must.

I don’t believe the present-day, atheistic, materialist consensus about the nature of reality.

I believe in God.  I believe that we are all subject to an objective Moral Law which we did not create, but that we must discover (even if we often imperfectly apprehend it).  I don’t believe that we human beings are nothing more than the sum of our biological, physical parts, predestined to do only what the electrical impulses in our brains tell us to do.  And I don’t believe that most people, in their heart of hearts, actually believe that their own thoughts, hopes, dreams, and loves, are simply predetermined biochemical phantasmagoria, either.

The Holocaust was the clearest possible manifestation of the reality that there is ironclad, objective good and evil in this world, and that human beings are free moral actors who can choose to obey or disobey an ultimate moral standard.

Today, nearly 80 years to the day after Kristallnacht, there are people who deny that the Holocaust ever happened.  There are people who, once again, are calling for the destruction of the Jewish people.  

Each one of us still faces that same moral choice to help or to harm; to ally ourselves with the forces of light and life, or the forces of darkness and death.

What happened to the Jews in the Holocaust was not simply a matter of one particular society abstractedly seeking the greatest good for the greatest number of people in its own unique way; or of soulless collections of atoms, simply following the mindless, predestined promptings of the electrical impulses in their brains.

No.  It was an act of carefully orchestrated, sadistic, impossibly wicked and otherwise inexplicable diabolical evil; consciously designed to destroy an entire group of people in the cruelest, most humiliating manner possible.  

How else does one explain this horrific account of the Nazis’ perverse leveraging of the Jewish holiday of Purim, which commemorates the defeat of Haman’s genocidal plot to destroy the Jews in Persia, for maximum murderous impact:

The Holocaust wasn’t an unfortunate lapse of judgement, in which the perpetrators incorrectly ascertained what would produce the greatest good for the greatest number of people.  It wasn’t brought about by an unfortunate strand of deoxyribonucleic acid in the Nazi’s thoroughly material minds, which caused them to engage in behavior that most of us would subjectively perceive, in our own material minds, to be morally wrong. 

It was objectively, unequivocally, for all times and all places:  

Evil.

Epilogue: 

Below is a portion of C.S. Lewis’ powerful philosophical argument for an objective Moral Law:

What The Berlin Wall Taught Me

By Jason Segedy

February 21, 2014

The Berlin Wall, as viewed from West Berlin, March 1987. I shot this from an observation platform.

Meine Reise nach Berlin

In 1987, when I was 14 years old, I went to Germany.  It was a journey full of personal firsts. 

It was the first time that I had ever been outside of the United States.

It was the first time that I had ever been on an airplane - a 24 hour, multiple-layover odyssey, courtesy of Pan-Am and TWA, which took us from Cleveland, to New York, to London, to Frankfurt, to Berlin.

And it was the first (and only) time that I had been behind the Iron Curtain. 

Twenty-seven years ago, this March, I crossed the Berlin Wall at Checkpoint Charlie and visited Soviet-occupied East Berlin.  Twenty-six years before that, in 1961, the Berlin Wall was constructed.  The wall separated the totalitarian east from the democratic west.  It separated friends and colleagues from one another, divided families, and served as a major flashpoint in the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union. 

The “wall” was actually two walls, separated by hundreds of feet.  The empty area between the two walls was flanked by coils of barbed wire, patrolled by dogs, and guarded by snipers in towers.  You would be unlikely to make it more than halfway across before you were killed – and several hundred people were, trying to do just that.

It was easy to see what the West Berliners thought of the wall – every square inch was covered with (mostly political) graffiti.  The side that faced East Berlin, however, was virgin concrete, unsullied by graffiti.  It bore mute testimony to the voiceless East Berliners that had been silenced by their own government, the German “Democratic” Republic (a.k.a. East Germany).

When we crossed into East Berlin, it was like crossing from a color world into a black and white one.  West Berlin was like New York, with a little bit of Las Vegas thrown in for good measure. 

East Berlin was like…I was going to say “Detroit”, but that’s not nice…and not really true, either.

Crossing over into East Berlin, you could actually feel the oppression.  Some areas of the city were still bombed-out from World War II, and piles of rotting lumber sat unused at vacant construction sites, where it looked like nothing had happened for decades.  There were far fewer people on the streets, and far fewer shops and stores.  It was primarily a city full of drab blocks of apartments, with a few communist monuments thrown in for good measure.

Yours truly, in front of the Berlin Wall, 1987

In the west, people smiled, and would make eye contact with you.  The place was lousy with advertisements, neon signs, and street level kiosks selling cigarettes, snacks, newspapers, and lots of pornography.  Late-model Volkswagens, BMWs, and Mercedes-Benzes filled the streets, and edgy electronic music emanated from the ubiquitous discotheques, seemingly located on every block.

In the east, no one really made eye contact.  The streets were largely silent, and looked empty by comparison.  There were few pedestrians, and even fewer cars.  The cars that we saw were these little two-cylinder numbers that looked like you could kick them apart.  It looked depressed, and felt depressing.  It was a place without hope.

When we returned to the west, Russian soldiers spent about 45 minutes searching us and our bus on the way back, to make sure that we were not smuggling anyone or anything back across the border.

My Dad was there with me.  He had always wanted to be stationed in Germany when he was in the Army, but the only overseas gig that they offered him was Vietnam. 

I wish that I could go back and do that trip over again.  Although I was pretty mature and well-behaved (for a 14 year old), there are so many more things that I would have noticed and appreciated as an adult. 

On the other hand, seeing the Cold War up-close-and-personal, as a 14 year old, offers a valuable perspective, too.  Growing up, I honestly believed that there was a decent chance that I would be vaporized by a Soviet ICBM.  Like a lot of other kids in the 1980s, I put my odds at surviving until adulthood at around 50/50.

I became an adult in 1990.  The Cold War ended the very next year.  Who knew? 

Here in the present-day, it is all-too-easy to forget that I went to bed every night knowing that a global thermonuclear war was a horrifyingly real possibility.  Millions of people in Berlin were forcibly separated by a wall that served as a constant reminder of the atomic sword of Damocles that hung over the heads of an additional billion people, like myself, living throughout North America, Europe, and the U.S.S.R. 

Even harder to grasp is the fact that just 42 years before my visit, that very city, Berlin, served as the capital of the most technologically advanced, rational, scientific, and so-called “civilized” nation on earth – a nation that convinced tens of millions of its own highly-educated, rational, thoroughly modern citizens that murdering six million Jews in cold blood was “progress”, and was the right thing to do.

Twenty-seven years after my visit, it is starting to hit home that my trip to Berlin actually is a “historical” event, just like World War II was when I visited.  Time is a funny thing.

The Scourge of Fatalism

So what did the Berlin Wall teach me?

It goes back to that “Who knew?” 

No one did, of course.  Not, for sure, anyway.

We never know.

So why is it that we so often pretend like we do?

Fatalism might be the single biggest thing that holds us back as a culture.  We forget that what we do here, in the present, controls what happens in the future.

Fatalism is to the 2010s, what irony was to the 1990s – a defense mechanism that we employ to avoid confronting the crushing reality of free human choice. 

At times, we simply cannot bear the great and terrible responsibility implicit in the fact that what each of us chooses to do individually, and what all of us choose to do collectively, affects our world and our future in great and profound ways.  

It is the collective sum of the untold billions of human choices, great and small, that each of us make each and every day, which (excepting what is truly beyond our control - accident, natural disaster, disease, and death) are directly responsible for every ounce of misery and suffering on this planet. 

We have met the enemy and he is us.

On the other hand, we collectively have the power and the capacity to make our world into a virtual paradise. 

But what can we really do?  We are just individuals.  What can any of us, even the most virtuous or noble among us, really change in the end?  We are, each one of us, simply one of a billion of grains of sand on a desolate beach.  How can we be expected to make a difference?

So, instead, we resort to fatalism.  It makes the conundrum of free human choice a lot easier to deal with, and it assuages the feeling of helplessness that comes with the recognition of our individuality and our dependence upon others.

It’s a cold comfort, that some may argue is better than nothing.  But, the thing is, it doesn’t help us. 

In fact, it makes our situation even worse.  It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

See, we know that the future is going to be such-and-such, so there’s really no point in trying to change it.

Sound familiar?

How about these:

We know that people of different races are just never going to get along.  People are people.

We know that there is no way that we are going to be able to produce the energy that we need, and protect the environment at the same time.  We’re powerless to change it.

We know that, no matter what we do, we are never going to be able to provide enough health care, food, or shelter for those that need it.  So why bother trying?

We know that Americans love their cars and their big houses, and there is no point trying to promote alternatives to driving, or to urban sprawl.  That’s just the way it is.

But, see, the thing is, we don’t really know any of these things.  Take a look at history.  Most of our prophecies about the future have been wrong.  And most of the prophecies that were not, were of the self-fulfilling variety. 

Some of the people in Warsaw, in May 1942, were undoubtedly just as sure as the Nazis were, that the German Reich would last for a thousand years.

By May 1945, the Reich was gone.

Some of the people in Berlin, in March 1987, were sure that the Cold War would never end, and that the Wall would never come down.

By November 1989, the Wall was gone.

Some of the people in Northeast Ohio, in 2014, are sure that we are destined to remain the “Rust Belt” from here to eternity.

We’re not.

My trip to Berlin in 1987 was a reminder to never give up hope, even when things seem dark. 

History is neither a long, slow march toward utopia, nor toward oblivion.  It is whatever we choose to make it.

There will be new Berlin Walls in the future, and there will also be new people to tear them down.

Fatalism is the logical conclusion of an age of philosophical naturalism (i.e. materialism) that believes that at bottom, we (our thoughts and our very consciousness) are no more than the sum of our biochemical and physical parts, and that our actions are (by the inescapable logic of naturalistic determinism) simply nothing more than the products of mindless and purposeless collisions of subatomic particles, and electrical impulses in our brains that simply give us the illusion of free will, consciousness, and self-hood itself.

There is no free will.  No objective beauty.  No objective truth.  No purpose. 

No hope. 

What you do ultimately makes no difference.  All human plans, hopes, dreams, and loves will come to nothing in the end, when the sun goes supernova, the universe collapses in upon itself, all atomic particles cease their motion, and all matter (which is all there is, and which is all “we” are, anyway) reaches absolute zero.

Fatalism.

Don’t believe it for a second.  Reject it, and choose your future.  What you choose to do today matters. 

Live it out.