Jen Gerson: The Case for Optimism

Sorry we've been so grim around here lately

Critique the work as you will, but I still think there are few essays or books that explain the nature of mass movements more clearly than Eric Hoffer's True Believer, published in 1951. It's a work I find myself coming back to every few years; one in which I stumble upon insights and anecdotes that strike me as obviously true, and even prescient. 

Hoffer created a kind of taxonomy for the types of people who are pulled into revolutions and mass movements — which are all interchangeable forces of collective identity that form in response to historical conditions. The aims and intentions of the movements differ from era to era, but the kinds of people who are drawn to them are not. 

Hoffer noted that the abjectly poor rarely find themselves central to mass movements — they are generally too busy struggling to survive. Rather "It is usually those whose poverty is relatively recent, the 'new poor,' who throb with the ferment of frustration. The memory of better things is as fire in their veins. They are the disinherited and dispossessed who respond to every rising mass movement."

Hoffer adds: "The present-day workingman in the Western world feels unemployment as a degradation. He sees himself disinherited and injured by an unjust order of things, and is willing to listen to those who call for a new deal." 

Add to this category underemployment and precarious employment, and I think it hits pretty close to the mark. It's usually not the dispossessed who want to burn society to the ground; it's those who imagined themselves destined for something better, and have been forced to face a bleaker reality than the one to which they imagine they had been entitled — the middle-class college graduate who must confront the shock that she will never afford a home, nor put enough money away for retirement. Adhering to a new mass movement, adopting its jargon and mouthing its pieties, is a way to reclaim lost social status. 

I should note that Hoffer’s book, published in ‘56, examined historic “mass movements” that had a totalizing, authoritarian characteristic — not merely protest movements. Feminism or the civil rights movements, for example, that draw in oppressed and marginalized people who want better lives, don’t all demonstrate the cult-like ethos of movements Hoffer’s book observes.

However, the point remains. If enough of these types decide to abandon the ethos that inculcated them with their dashed hopes, then the intellectual myths of their society will inevitably face a challenge. This is a complicated way to make an obvious point: if too many people feel as if they can't get ahead, well, weird things happen. 

We've been increasingly grim about the future unfolding before us here at The Line, and some of you readers have noticed. You're put off by our apparent alarmism, and I can take the criticism. It's true. Both of your Line editors believe that we are heading into a cycle of historical decline — decline, not collapse, mind you. We think things are going to get incrementally worse on a number of different fronts, but no one here has gone full prepper. It's just worse, it's not The Walking Dead. 

We're facing serious, existential interconnected challenges and they're hitting us all simultaneously. The pandemic, environmental crisis, infrastructure, the economy, demographics, and our ideological outlook and self-conception — each of these would be difficult to manage individually, if our country and society were operating at peak. As it stands, we are not operating at peak. We are in a state of cultural and bureaucratic stagnation in which mediocrity, complacency and lack of leadership have to be baked into all of our assumptions regarding the performance of our government, in times of crisis or even “peacetime.” 

We've enjoyed decades of growth, wealth and relative tranquil stability that has numbed us to the true fragility of our comfort. Our way of life is an historical anomaly, and we've forgotten that, numbly secure in the knowledge that things will always be the way they have been; cozy, well-fed, democratic, safe. 

This lack of perspective causes us to overreact to acute crises and underreact to systemic ones. It’s “Red alert! Battle stations!” when a Donald Trump is elected, and a new virus out of China threatens a pandemic. But when infrastructure begins to fail and temperature begins to rise and the cost of groceries begins to go up and our bureaucracy takes months to figure out how to report basic statistics or pay its own workers their salaries, well, that's just how things are, eh? Canada, right? 

We are not who we thought ourselves to be, and we are not getting what we thought we deserved. 

Decline, of course, is relative. It's not going to hit everyone the same. 

If you were to tell me that I'm going to have a life that looks more like my grandmother's and less like my mother's, that would sound about right to me. In the next 15 years, I would expect to see a little less variety in the grocery store in winter; I'll eat out less, and travel less often. I'll probably read about a little more conflict around the world. I expect I will have to take a few more precautions to keep my family safe. 

There will be a little less security, a little less convenience, and a little more making do. 

For others, decline may look like an escape into fantasy; an increasing reliance on video games, virtual reality, porn, and other fake digitized accomplishments to avoid a hopeless physical reality that can be neither avoided nor overcome. 

And yet, I also expect to see many of the trends of modernity continue to accelerate; easy access to an ever-greater quantity of cheaper, more degraded material goods will go a long way to hide the real reduction in our quality of life. It's easy to pretend things are going well if you can still attractively outfit your home and keep an ample supply of food on the table — never mind that your furniture is now made of cardboard instead of wood and your food is crap that is making you fat. For those in a state of abject poverty, this growing plethora of cheap goods and cheap food is a godsend; better comfort and obesity than scarcity and starvation. But for those coming from the other side of the class divide, it's an illusion to mask decline. 

And it's coming at a cost. The first and most obvious cost is environmental. Many have spoken quite a lot already about our fossil fuel consumption. Our reliance on oil is a technical problem in need of resolution.

But the hidden social cost of our lifestyle worries me as much. We purchase our convenience at the cost of our skills. It makes us increasingly dependent on a benumbing, disposable culture in which we have no choice but to consume or to die. Basic abilities like repair, sewing, gardening, cooking — these are no longer standard skill sets, but rather luxury hobbies that can only be indulged by those who have spare income and free time.  

This system is reducing us from whole human beings with myriad interests, skills and community affiliations into half-formed creatures, incentivized to maximize our economic utility via insecure work. And as that work becomes more precarious, only those who have most efficiently maximized said utility will maintain their grip on the class ladder; the rest falling into the trap of an aimless, low-quality digital decadence in which we fight for the validation and status that we can't acquire in the real world. Thanks Facebook. And Twitter. And Instagram, and the rest.

But decline isn't collapse. Even if we do experience a downward shift in our quality of life, we're still miles ahead of our ancestors. Technology won't roll back. We will still have access to better food, better housing, better clothes, better communications capability and better entertainment than a human born in 1850 could have imagined. And thanks to the technological progress we've already made, there's every reason to be optimistic that we have the tools at hand to solve some of our most pressing shared problems as a species. 

The Internet, a mixed blessing, will both destroy the lives we knew, but give us the opportunity to build them into something else. The fact that I am writing this screed on a solely digital platform is not lost to me. The Internet's value as sheer entertainment is not worthless, and virtually any skill can be learned here for free. If you want to age homemade cheese in your basement or raise your own honey and chickens in your backyard, the library of all collected human knowledge lies before you. 

Lastly, I also don't bet against liberal democracies in the long run. During the world wars, the smart money would have bet against us. The strength and overwhelming apparent unity of the emerging fascist states were, prior to the war, a terror to behold, and our squabbling democracies looked weak by comparison. Indeed, there was no guarantee that the allied nations would win the wars — and the fight was precarious before the U.S. joined the effort. So why did we win? There are a lot of reasons, but our culture and political system played a role. Totalitarian states force the consent of their subjects through fear and control. The kind of consent that can be manufactured under these conditions is rapid, but superficial, and often eventually incompetent. 

By comparison, in messy liberal democracies, we spend a lot of time disagreeing and backstabbing and fighting. But when we buy into a cause, or an idea, or a direction, we really genuinely do buy in. For better or worse, this creates the ability to mobilize mass resources at an unparalleled scale; the government coordinates this process, but it shouldn't need to coerce its citizenry. That means we're often slow off the mark, but when we actually do decide to do something, the gears of our will are unstoppable. 

The extraordinary unanimity of identity and purpose after September 11 was the last time "the West" experienced this kind of collective assertion (much of the effort was wasted or worse, but the unity was real). But I'm sure you can think of other, smaller examples. 

I recall the Calgary floods of 2013, in which most of the city's downtown core was inundated with several feet of water. The community's response was miraculous. People just showed up in front of flooded houses wearing boots and holding shovels to muck out basements. They spent hours helping strangers. They formed spontaneous command centres on city blocks and those who could not dig brought donuts and coffee for the volunteers. No one had to tell us to do this. 

We just knew. This is what you do. 

Getting back to that space doesn't require a revolution. We simply have to remember who we are, where we came from, and how we got here. If I have a case for optimism, it lies here. 

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