Column: A jigsaw but no picture -- straws in the wind
By Charles Jeanes
Introduction: a jigsaw that won’t compose a picture
I’m not going to discipline myself within a topic today. Several subjects have grabbed my attention at various times the last week or two, and rather than make one of them the point of an essay, I will just make remarks on each and move on. What coherence might result, is serendipitous rather than deliberate.
Sharing the wealth around never was the real engine of social order
We once thought economics would fix poverty, political scientists would fix social injustice, chemists and biologists would fix environmental problems, and the power of reason would prevail. But it didn’t. Now we have lost this perfect-world-through-science vision we once had… — Charles Eisenstein
The middle class was a 75-year anomaly. The Garden is fading, and the gravity of the Barbell is reasserting itself. For 75 years, [middle-class] professionals lived in a heavily maintained, artificial ecosystem we called “The Garden.” We were taught that ordinary effort would produce ordinary security. We bent the historical barbell into a diamond shape, and we mistook that anomaly for a permanent law of nature. That maintenance has stopped. The walls of the Garden are falling. As we revert back to the barbell Economy, your income and your job title are lagging indicators. – Todd Wostrel
https://medium.com/@twostrel/the-middle-class-was-never-supposed-to-exist-55683d54769a
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=middle+class+is+temporary+Functional+Melancholic
Let us explore this idea, that a middle class as we have known it, was not ever going to last. Nor was it going to grow and include ever more people. It was a social and economic, and cultural, phenomenon of a very special time.
I am like a lot of people, limited to my knowledge of the “real world” by the filters of ideas I have taken on in my childhood. I was born in 1951.
To wit, I grew up in the world Charles Eisenstein describes, believing implicitly that the direction of world history since my father’s time, or his mother’s time, was progressive. People were getting better lives all the time. More food, better medicine, greater health, and longer lives were “facts” when I was ten. (1961)
Most importantly, people were steadily becoming more affluent. The middle class I was born to, was growing; more people were getting in. They wanted it.
The point of being a political progressive – a “leftist,” feminist, civil-rights activist, environmentalist, and anti-poverty social-justice warrior – was precisely to make sure more and more people did indeed progress to being middle-class, being like me and my friends when I was growing up.
Maybe you have heard this news: the middle class we have known was not a natural effect of modern scientific capitalism helping humanity live better. It was an accident. It happened, and it was fun while it lasted, but… do not plan your life on the premise that that comfortable life is expanding its circle to include more and more humans. The world is not coming to be more and more like Canada in 1961 (or America or England, France or Denmark etc.) The wonderful affluence of my own lifetime for middle class Canadians, was all along a temporary socio-economic phenomenon.
Imagine my dismay! I had indeed thought that humanity was moving as the dream of my childhood said it was. Now I get it. History produced a moment for that fortunate class of folks, and History then moved on, and the moment has passed. Governments do not do what governments once did, and capitalism “doesn’t care” to do what it did, for the lucky few between 1945 and 1995.
It had to pass, just as the moment of “Western Triumph” passed after the Cold War was won (1992). That peak of dominance was clearly over by 2001.
Reader, are you intrigued by the transience of our existence as middle-class Canadians in this all-too-brief era? I am. I do not know if it really is so, that the future will be what Todd Wostrel calls “the barbell” shape of society, but he makes a case that we have to face that future as a fact. https://toddwostrel.substack.com/about
You and I will not be around to see if he is correct. Meanwhile, thinking that progress toward widely-shared middle-class life is an illusion, I now feel less inclined to criticize conservative people who never believed progress was real.
As an historian, I should have learned by now that progress is just a word.
Sorry, Karl Marx! You inspired some bad history-makers.
You no doubt have heard of Karl Marx somewhere sometime in reading the Arc in the past two decades? A mind and a philosophy I have much admired and allowed to shape my own consciousness and thinking.
Marx demonstrated to his own satisfaction how Capital had become the new -and better – social and economic order after Feudalism, and he taught that Socialism was going to replace Capitalism as natural social evolution, as if by a law of nature. Class struggle, class war, was a Law of history. It drove progress.
Could the improvement in human lives make faster progress? Or did we have to wait on slow evolution? Good news: Revolution could accelerate Evolution!
Being caught in the beliefs of Progress (as Marx himself was) I too, like Lenin or Trotsky, Mao or Castro, was convinced humans could make history move faster to the goal of better societies — by Revolution. Overthrow the ruling class (who wanted to freeze things in time, where only they possessed wealth and power) and move to an order where there’d be no classes, the class war over, everyone free, equal, affluent, unexploited. Social justice could be constructed.
And then history happened in Russia (1917) , and China (1949), and the geniuses who led the revolutions, who knew their Marxian philosophy well, who knew what to do, were put in charge of constructive experiments in those vast, populous states. After all, Marx told us, the point of philosophy is not to interpret/ illuminate the world, the point is to change it (the world).
What Marx knew, but chose to minimize, was that in the past, the movements of history from one mode or state to another – most notably from feudalism to capitalism – did not come about by the action of self-consciously deliberate plans to “construct capitalism.” Capitalism has a history so long as to be impossible to agree on its origins; did it begin in medieval Europe or ancient times, for example? The literature on the question of timing is voluminous.
Marx could articulate a fine theory, and he did indeed do that, with the historical record of capitalist revolutions in England, and France, and in his own lifetime in Germany. He set out to demonstrate how the new bourgeois capitalist class became the ruling class by taking power from the feudal-noble, aristocratic ruling class. Capitalist revolutions happened. Classes warred.
These revolutions always involved much violence, terror, civil war, and mass loss of life. Russia and China, in their Marxian-communist Revolutions, surely had a lot of that. But in the revolutions Marx studied, there were no political parties working from a theory. Lenin and Mao had theory. Cromwell in England and Danton in France, as examples, did not have a theory for their revolutions.
Russia and China, with quite different results in 2026, underwent revolutions with party leaderships. Lenin, in his textbook guide on party-making, What is to do? (1903) laid down the lessons for a Marxian party to become the leaders of the proletariat and peasantry. The Party worked impressively, so effectively it was able to seize Russia from the top, wrecking the Tsarist and Liberal regimes and replacing them. Mao’s Marxian party, founded in 1921, had taken over China by 1949, helped greatly by the Party in Moscow which knew from experience how to revolutionize a very poor country. https://www.rbth.com/history/333268-how-ussr-helped-communists-china
But Russia and China – poor, underdeveloped economies, with societies and economies quite primitive compared to England or America – had not gone through the slow historical processes that in Europe put capitalism in control there. Lenin and Mao with their Party bureaucracies and armies, village cadres and laws, constructed the improved social orders by Plans. (e.g. Stalin and his 5-year plans for the economy. https://www.loc.gov/exhibits/archives/intn.html or the secret police Lenin created with Dzerzhinsky. https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/history/felix-dzerzhinsky
Marxian-derived history lessons always had this problem: what society had developed by largely unconscious activities in the socio-economic history of capitalism, was going to be a process of construction-by-design under the regime of a communist Party-State. Capitalists were an urban class by accident of being a social layer of non-nobles in commerce. The industrial proletariat was a class-with-intent once Marxist revolutionaries had created what Marx (and Engels) theorized as “dictatorship of the proletariat” or “workers’ state.”
We can see how well that turned out for the USSR, for Russians and eastern Europeans; it did not turn out well by several measures. And China, while maintaining the one-Party State with totalitarian cultural methods, has had to set free a degree of capitalism in order to bring material benefit to the Chinese.
Is West the Best?
The West stumbled its way to the civilization we now live in – you and I, readers – and along that way the West has experienced the horror and atrocity of chattel slavery, near-constant wars, inhumanity to workers (by owners of capital in factories, mines, fields, and offices) barbaric legal codes imposed, on women and minority populations, etc. etc. The contradiction – between our best and most-enlightened moral/legal standards and the actual practice of our rulers on the ground – has been stupendously obvious. But whatever were the motivations of individuals – greed or philanthropy, egoism or rights – society got its shape by juggling, not by an attempt at constructing society from the ideas of intellectuals. History made with spaghetti, not bricks, so to speak.
Lenin, Trotsky, Mao, Deng, and so many other intelligent individuals who won power over millions of humans by leading Marxian-inspired revolutionary wars, were not improvising in the way individuals have in much of history. They had what they believed were blueprints for society-building, and they had bricks.
The consequence of deliberate social plans, engineering and constructing new politics, economics, culture, and even private lives, by revolutionaries, is a lot of misery. More or less misery than History-without-Plans? I would not venture an estimate with such grim calculus; the human condition isn’t mathematics.
One more Straw in the wind of mind
This is a late-night thought but I’ll tack it onto this Arc for the sake of a bit of stimulation.
Charles Taylor, Canada’s greatest living philosopher, has summed up the puzzles of our personal philosophies this way: We are trying to answer two basic questions – “What is right to do? What is good to be?”
My two Arc columns before this one, took on two topics. First, Canada’s probabilities for survival as a single State in the century ahead, and second, the mystery of what it means to be a Self, or soul, or individual “person”.
Here is my half-articulated thought: the motivations of Canadians who want to end the Federation, who want a sovereign independent Quebec and the same for Alberta, have answered Taylor’s questions differently than I do. They reply, “It is right to destroy the federation and allow our Province to be become an independent nation, and do whatever it might take to promote that goal.” “It is good to be a sovereign Quebec (Alberta) citizen.”
What is the essence of the good life these people, with these opinions, are imagining? Why do they connect that good life with the large world of political independence? Do they think those who disagree can be persuaded?
I notice constantly that Albertans make mostly economic arguments for their sovereignty – that an independent Alberta is a richer Alberta, more free to do resource-development and commerce on their own than they are able to at present; the grievances with our federation concern material measures of good.
The Quebecois have a more complex argument, as befits a population with a long, deep history going back to the sixteenth century in that land once called New France. But support for Quebec independence also bases itself on economic arguments and the promise of a more prosperous, affluent, life.
How did the separation/independence point-of-view take hold of so many minds? I think I get it. It is the application of politics as a cultural phenomenon to take the place religion once occupied in consciousness. Religion once held many more minds in the West within its “enchantment”, as Taylor makes brilliantly clear in his book, A Secular Age. The West’s enchanted mind has gone and cannot be reconstructed after centuries of modern consciousness.
The idea that modern life replaces religion with politics (or economics, or cultural pursuit, or psychological activism) is hardly a novel insight. It seems to a simple truism. There are so many times when what seems to be at work, when people take on causes, is, they take on The Cause with the fervor of faith.
[ https://www.libraryofsocialscience.com/ideologies/resources/gentile-a-never-never/
https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/civil-theology-robert-bellah
https://pac.org/impact/business-school-next-step-4 ]
To say that independantistes treat their political cause with the same fervor as a faith, does not, I quite comprehend, give me any kind of argument against what they want. They believe what they say, that independence leads on to a better life for them in the new sovereign state they want to erect. Trying to convince someone about a hypothetical improvement in quality of life seems a truly wasted effort. I won’t make that effort. It just saddens me that so many people are going to devote themselves to these causes in Alberta and Quebec, with the only certainty being that conflict and division, dislike and frustration, are bound to increase during the process. Indigenous people will suffer too.
Conclusions.
You’re kidding me. You did not actually expect this column to come to some conclusions. Sorry, not this time. It was not that kind of essay and my mind is not operating toward conclusion. Observations, notions, but no summing up.
