Crawling from the Wreckage

If I could be a fictional character
, I think I would choose to be Hari Seldon, the “psychohistorian” in Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series who devised a scientific method to predict the future of human civilization, and to steer it onto better courses. Since that does not appear to be an available option, I make do with being a newspaper columnist, and plod on with my highly unscientific analyses of where our collective actions are leading us. It keeps me busy and it feeds my family, so I shouldn’t complain.

I did spend a lot of time complaining during the past decade, however, because it seemed to me that just about everything was going wrong. Stupid wars, obsessions about terrorism, denial about climate change, rapacious turbo-capitalism and lies, lies, lies: from 2001 to 2005, it just got worse and worse. When I published a collection of my columns from that time, I called it
With Every Mistake
[We Must Surely Be Learning]. The lawyers made us drop the latter part of the quote for fear of infringing on George Harrison’s copyright, but the truth is that I didn’t really think we were learning at all. Just making more and more mistakes, and putting the future more and more at risk. It was a bad time.

So, here we are in 2010, and I must admit that I feel a lot better. The world is not a perfect place, nor even a safe and happy one, but that sense of sliding out of control towards ten different kinds of disaster has gone. This book is called
Crawling from the Wreckage
, not “The Broad and Sunlit Uplands,” because we still have a long way to go, but I think Hari Seldon would agree that the prospects have improved considerably. We must be doing something right. What is it?

That is the theme of this book, to the extent that a collection of columns can really be said to have a theme. I have ransacked the five hundred or so articles I wrote during the past five years for clues to how and why we turned the corner, just as in the previous book I looked for the reasons why things had gotten so bad. This time it has been a much more pleasant task.

So you will find that inquisitive strand running through this book, but don’t expect miracles. Causation in history is the slipperiest of commodities, and identifying the causes of good outcomes is much harder than determining the causes of disasters.

Most disasters are clearly delineated events that are finite in time and space, and the proximate causes are generally choices made by a relatively small number of decision makers. You can actually put names to the people, policies and organizations that were responsible for the incompetent response to the inundation of New Orleans in 2005 or the financial meltdown of 2008. Whereas positive outcomes are more diffuse and less dramatic, and we in the media rarely launch a hunt for those who were responsible.

Suppose all of our current worries go away: climate change is contained before it causes really big catastrophes; China and India take their places as the world’s biggest and third-biggest powers without violent resistance from the other powers being demoted (like the United States), and they behave responsibly in their new roles; Iran doesn’t build a bomb; the Israelis and Palestinians make a peace deal that sticks; and post-occupation Iraq lives happily ever after. It could all happen, although the odds are long against it. Still, some of it probably will happen: not everything that we worry about in today’s world will actually come to pass in tomorrow’s. As they say in the financial world, “goldbugs” (pessimistic investors who flee to gold for safety) have successfully predicted eleven of the last three recessions. So the present moment, which seems rife with possibilities for good and evil, may not actually be the hinge of fate on which all of the future hangs. In which case, what we do now shouldn’t matter much—or does it?

Good outcomes get less attention than bad ones and their parentage is harder to discern, but they do have causes. Somebody, or some large number of people, made the right decisions and not the wrong ones, which is why we are here and not in a much worse place. But on the positive side of the ledger it is hard to pin down who and when and where, and, to make things more difficult, we do not know what will happen in the near future.

If I were writing this introduction exactly a century ago, for a hypothetical collection of my columns written from 1905 to 1910, I would be completely ignorant of the fact that the worst war in history was going to break out in 1914. I would not look for the remote causes of that war in the events of my own time because I would not know where the tide of those events was taking us.

I am therefore engaged in an essentially futile pursuit, because what I try to do in these columns is draw connections between a present that I only half understand and a future that I do not know. But I was trained as an historian, and I still think like one. I believe that actions have consequences, and I cannot help trying to trace the threads of causation that reach out from current events into the future. I go on doing it even though I know how capricious history can be. Welcome to my obsession.

History doesn’t really have a plot, and even the patterns that we imagine we see depend mainly upon our own standpoint. The arc of the past five years would seem very different from a Chinese perspective than from a Western one, and different again from a Middle Eastern one. But from my Western perspective, our recent history is about a painfully slow recovery from a very bad time
.

So, here are some articles about the United States, because that country still sets the tone. I’ve been going to the U.S. fairly frequently for most of my life, but it never felt as alien as it did in 2004. They were even going to re-elect George Bush. How could they possibly have failed to notice?

I was starting to lose patience—and then my son Owen (aka “Nameless”) put me back on track
.

Russian President Vladimir Putin wants George W. Bush to be re-elected, Osama bin Laden undoubtedly wants him to be re-elected, and the head of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council has just endorsed him for re-election, so it’s hardly surprising that one of my sons has done the same. He must remain nameless, of course, but he has given me permission to quote his exact words on the subject of Mr. Bush’s candidacy: “He has sown the wind; let him reap the whirlwind.”

This nameless offspring of mine has never worked for the
KGB
, planned terrorist attacks or been nominated as a member of the “Axis of Evil,” but he does share with the three gentlemen above a rather Machiavellian turn of mind. His point is that Iraq will go to hell and the U.S. economy will run into heavy weather in the next four years no matter who is president. Those things are already practically set in stone—so let the man who actually caused them carry the can.

There is no way that Iraqi hostility to the American occupation can be turned around at this point, and the current outbreak of fiscal irresponsibility in the U.S.—a huge budget deficit and a huge trade deficit, amounting to almost half a trillion dollars each—will certainly result in a great deal of economic pain and misery for ordinary Americans in the coming years. We all know who got the U.S. into Iraq and who created the budget deficit, but the man who is president when military defeat and economic crisis can no longer be denied will bear the political blame.

The main concern of Nameless was that a Kerry election victory, followed by a humiliating scuttle from Iraq and a crash in the U.S. dollar at home, would generate a “Dolchstoss” myth on the American right. He was referring to the alleged “stab in the back” by the German left that was used to explain Germany’s defeat in the First World War. (In fact, the German left had loyally supported the war, but had little say in its conduct—until, after Germany’s generals admitted irretrievable military defeat on the Western Front, the government was swiftly handed over to the Social Democrats, so that they could surrender and take the blame.)

The Dolchstoss myth, which denied that it had been a mistake to start the war and instead blamed Germany’s defeat on a failure of will, poisoned
all subsequent efforts to create a healthy democratic republic on German soil. No analogy is perfect, but similar myths exist in U.S. politics.

Many on the American right still believe that the Vietnam War could have been won if only the spineless traitors on the left had not weakened American “resolve”—and they say this even though President Richard Nixon, who was elected on a promise to end the Vietnam War and presided over the whole latter phase of it, was a Republican. What could they do with a lost war on a Democratic president’s watch?

My son’s point was that the mess created by the last administration cannot be fixed and forgotten before the 2008 election, no matter who wins next month—so why not vote for George W. Bush to ensure that the blame is pinned on the right man? That way, there can be no “stab-in-the-back” legend that haunts the Democratic Party in years to come, or that fuels a drive by hard-right radicals flying the Republican banner to regain the White House in 2008.

The downside of this, from a Democratic point of view, is four more years out of executive power, a Supreme Court packed with Bush appointees, and significant damage to both America’s reputation and the U.S. economy. The negative consequences from Iraq’s point of view are even bigger: years more of violence and death.