Who Is To Blame?

One of my continuing disagreements with the liberal blogosphere involves who we blame for the ridiculousness of our time.

There is no end of culprits. The stupidity of George W. Bush. The evil of Dick Cheney. A vast right-wingl conspiracy. The ignorance  of our so-called "serious" analysts. A long-running plot by the Bush family going back generations.

In a way such theories are comforting. They absolve us from blame or participation in the bad things happening all around us. We can see ourselves as helpless, frightened children, which gives us permission to indulge in childish temper tantrums.

I want to call bullshit on this.

As regular readers here know, I ascribe what is happening in our time to history.

To many that's a high-falutin term, but it really means the lessons you have learned in life, the lessons you were taught by your parents, and the lessons they were taught by their parents. We mix all these things into a personal legend, a personal myth with values, a personal history which we use to explain, justify, or fight against events. Combine all those personal legends and you get the national myth, what we believe to be our national story, with its own values, and its own requirements for the use of power.

In many of the pieces I've written here on this subject, I have gone into my own personal history. I have discussed the conservatism of my teen-age years. I have discussed the lessons of my father. When you're thinking about current events, I bet you do the same. You reflect on what has happened in your own life, what your parents taught you, and the legends of your grandparents.

That's really all history is. The word story is at the heart of it. History changes with every generation, as we attempt to make sense of the past in terms of the future.

Our collective memory of history is mainly determined by great crises we have witnessed. When someone says "9-11 changed everything" they are reacting to that one specific event, making the heart of their personal history the focus for their thoughts about what we should do tomorrow-and-tomorrow.

In my own work here I have looked at the largest political convulsions in American history, and 9-11 is not one of them. Just as the Cuban Missile Crisis is not one of them, or the rise and fall of Joe McCarthy. These were seminal events, but they were, in the end, events. A generation-changing crisis consists of a long series of convulsive events, a shared experience over many years, which causes people to fundamentally change their view of the world.

America is lucky. We are a democracy so what our people think counts. We are relatively autonomous -- separated by water from all our enemies -- so our internal political clock is what counts. This isn't true for other nations. American intervention re-set the political clocks of most people around the world. Many of the views held around the world are based on America's behavior toward them, in many cases behavior Americans may be dimly aware of. The Iran-Contra war did not re-set America's political clock, but it re-set the clock of Central America. The same is true for World War II -- for us it mainly validated assumptions dating back to 1933, where elsewhere it was a final midnight and the world is defined by that bright line between what came before and what came after, as with the dinosaur extinction.

The last convulsion similar to what Americans are now going through was called the 60s. It began with John F. Kennedy and ended with Richard Nixon. The lesson it taught most Americans was that conflict was necessary, that enemies are everywhere, and that such enemies must be confronted for America to survive.

The previous convulsion came with the Great Depression, which began with Herbert Hoover and ended with Franklin D. Roosevelt. Its lesson was quite different. We must work together, we must believe in our innate goodness, we must never give up hope, struggling today so tomorrow might be better.

The earlier convulsion made the sacrifices of World War II not only possible but palatable. It allowed the Greatest Generation to compartmentalize the horrors of that conflict, based on the lesson that we were the good guys, and the suffering was for generations yet to come. Veterans of World War I, by contrast, could not forget its horrors, becoming the "forgotten men" of the Depression.

The later convulsion taught different lessons. Those lessons were validated by the Reagan years, which is why conservatives often call this set of beliefs Reaganism. It's a nationalistic, religious, me-first ethos, and while none who follow it would dare call it Social Darwinism that's what it comes down to. Those who have, deserve it. Those who don't, don't deserve it.

Now we are in a new convulsion. It's impossible to tell its lessons from inside, just as you can't see the destruction of a hurricane from inside it or the results of a battle while fighting it. Each of us, every one of us, is dealing with their own story of this time, and with the failures of our current belief systems to even address the questions, let alone answer them.

I have also posited where we go from here. I have said new values, new myths, and a new media are needed to address this time, and come up with answers we can follow with renewed confidence. I have called this set of values, myths and media the Internet Thesis, and demonstrated how similar its development has been to past myths, the development of past collective belief systems.

In the story I tell we are not helpless. We are not children. We are adults, responsible for our beliefs, and the results of those beliefs. In my story we, the people selected George W. Bush, because we believed in the same things he believed, rather than the alternative story told by Bill Clinton, which accepted the premises of Bush's assumptions and sought to moderate them.

In my story we are free to change our minds. We are responsible for what happens. We can't pass it off to any small set of individuals, to any grand conspiracy. We have the power to change, and we always have had it.

I find it far more comforting, and far more reasonable, than anyone else's explanation for events. Especially since it lets me see a way forward.

You may not like my compass. Find your own. But take responsibility for it. Be a grownup.

Don't cry before history like a baby. Believe in something and seize the future.