I don't find your recent focus too negative -- it helps me to know there are others who see the alarming trends I see, and are worried about the same things I am worried about.
Entrenched inequality getting worse, unaffordable housing also getting worse, climate and environmental crises, growing authoritarianism (and growing misogyny), a decline in real community connections. A growing sense that our institutions are not really up to the challenges we face, and that they are barely coping with the operational demands of the pandemic.
These are all genuine concerns. We need to be talking about them. We need to start looking for societal levers to make a difference.
Over the holidays, I spoke to a few well-informed individuals who told me they were baffled by the continued health of the stock market, and could see no fundamental basis for it continuing based on general economic indicators. A major correction will only add to social unrest.
I was also advised - again by knowledgeable acquaintances - that we should expect continued inflation on food prices, driven by a wide variety of global forces. This will, of course, hurt those at the bottom the most.
To top it all off, our elephant sized neighbour next door is having some big challenges. We have ridden on their coat tails for so long, we have forgotten that we didn't achieve this security and prosperity all by ourselves. We need to start acting now to make better plans to look out for our own interests on the world stage. Yet this is just one other massive challenge that our governments don't seem to think worth discussion.
So are you being negative? No. You serve your readers well if you can enlighten us on these challenges, and help us be better informed. (I recognize that not all of this is in your wheelhouse!)
The paragraph about precarious work, being turned into a utility-maximizing drone, could have been lifted from Coupland's Gen-X book. (30 years ago! A whole generation!) I could change a dozen words of the Internet concerns, and produce something that would pass as a critique of Television - which was going to turn my generation into passive, mindless, mouth-breathing drones by 1975, I was assured by TIME and Newsweek.
Speaking of illiberalism and conflict abroad, America finally ended 20 years of pointless war and murder. It was certainly embarrassing that the American officer class was SO stupid, they had to be taught twice about the Mao's "Sixteen Character Formula", but I think they understand now, how irrelevant war-technologies are against populations, as opposed to armies. They'll probably be good for a couple of generations.
As to economic dislocation, nobody even talks about the 2008 financial crisis any more, we're eager to be past it without more grumbling about how no rich people got jailed. The fact is, the economy recovered, except for the 10 million who took permanent financial damage. I dunno how bad even THAT is. When I was 24, (Calgary, 1982) 90% of my company were all fired, every engineer I knew was out of work, there were five pages of "dollar sales" for underwater houses in the Calgary Herald. I filled in 3 years of unemployment getting another degree, while living in sad basement suites through my late 20s. A review of my 40th reunion engineering class indicates we nonetheless all recovered, had successful lives, families, retirements. Across the whole of life, it looks like a speed bump.
If rebuilding our infrastructure around GHG-free technologies proves to be expensive, I assure you it will be relatively less-so than when our modern infrastructure was built for the first time, 1930-1960 for most of it: back then, there was no preexisting industrial base to start from.
Lack of American democracy? Ask Black people who were around for Jim Crow. They've still got a lot more democracy than they had for 90 years.
My grandmother's generation had the Worst War in History, and a global pandemic that killed a few percent of all humanity. They had 10 good years, then 10 years of 30% unemployment and soup kitchens, and their kids had to be fed nonetheless. Then there was ANOTHER greatest war in history, more than twice as bad as the first, and they were required to send their children into it.
So my parents grew up fighting that, then trying to raise their kids under a nuclear threat, and a polio pandemic, where thousands lost the race to get vaccines before they were killed or their limbs withered. (Oh, and a post-war housing shortage that saw them start their marriage in a "boarding house", a concept now so unacceptable that we haven't re-invented it, even to get rid of tent cities. I can show you a picture of 11 or 12 twenty-somethings, "the gang", posing in front of a rather ordinary-sized house with maybe four bedrooms. Mom noted that the one guy who saw a lot of combat did wake them all up when he screamed in his nightmares, but nobody ever mentioned it.)
Bottom line, it won't be remotely as bad as Jen fears, you'll look back at the 2020s and smile at your concerns, the way I smile back at wondering how I'd survive the Great Calgary Recession of 1982-1989.
And if it is, you'll still be fine: you're descended from generations of heroes who sucked up far worse, and got on with not just life, but enjoying life.
Not sure I agree with your Police work there, Lou. 2008 didn't wrap up nice - it led to Trump. Wait til we see what Trump leads to. Nuclear devastation isn't off the table, we're not prepped for the next pandemic, and looking at climate change as a "soon to be fixed" problem of technology and spending is a little over-hopeful. Yes, things have been worse (the Bubonic Plague, asteroids falling on dinosaurs), and life will go on, but the essay didn't say otherwise. You can have your optimism, but don't condescend. It's rude.
Everything leads to something; I only meant that employment recovered, home-ownership rates recovered, gross statistics were pretty pre-2008 when the pandemic hit. (A similar time after 1938 was 1952, a decade of surging economy, so there's precedent. The notion that "most people lost everything and never recovered" lacks objective support, as it would about the Great Depression, where my wife's grandparents lost their farm, but were doing well by 1952.)
As to civility, the entire point of TheLine is to be condescending and critical of every politician and power-figure in sight. I'm sure the journalists can take as well as give. Especially if they want to piss and moan about a coming Age of Decline at people who've been threatened, quite seriously, with nuclear weapons.
Doubling down on the rude - okay. I'm not sure the point of The Line is to be condescending - it reads like journalism and analysis to me, which is not the same thing. I think it's very funny that you claim to have been threatened "quite seriously" by nuclear weapons but can't grant other people's fears about the already-begun climate catastrophe. (Also, lastly - you should quote things accurately if you're going to be pedantic. Lyle said "many", not "most".)
Sigh. "Kids these days don't know from tough" is a 2500-year-old trope, I think that Plato has an example on record. It's now reduced to a familiar comedy line, as my "Kids. They're hysterical" opening - about a 35-year-old mom of two - was intended to convey.
It was richly deserved, for predicting a decade of decline, a coming lifetime not as good as her Mom's, when even a few decades of historical context suggests that recovery will be swift. My own decades, and my parents and grandparents.
As to "rude", are you kidding me? Hard-working public servants aren't called "average performers" in this space, they're called "mediocrities".
It describes itself as "irreverent". Always, in the opinion of those used to reverence, that is "rude", i.e. Trudeau is not "questioned", he is "called on his bullshit", which you probably wouldn't say to your Mom, even if she was bullshitting you at the time.
Most of us would not read them if they were not rude to the powerful - but pushback in kind is fair.
The experience for immigrants and especially immigrant children is completely different. I suspect Jen's perspective is one of who's family had been in Canada for generations. It isn't her fault of course, being raised by the boomer "Golden Generation" where as long as you didn't make epic life mistakes life got better from year to year, backstopped by debt for things like free health care and OAS, is a hard act to follow. For immigrants, they don't take anything for granted. Good job, home, family, all have to be worked for, it doesn't just happen.
It is interesting though how the US just seems to motor through storm winds on sheer optimism and the benefits of superpower status (Reserve currency machine just prints and prints). I have a hypothesis that I doubt will be proven soon but I think a lot of angst, political and economic issues would be relieved if Canadians could easily move to the US and vice versa. People would be happier living amongst their own "tribe." Let the Canadian gunnies who want cheaper homes live in Montana, let the US left coast sociologists move to Montreal. I think it would be a huge destress for both countries.
Minor point about WWII, we joined forces with a very totalitarian force to defeat the other totalitarian forces. Still, I am on your side of the long bet.
No one means to undermine the efforts of the Soviets in that effort, so fair point! Totalitarianism didn't work out well for them in the long run, however.
Just don't fall for the Soviet assertion that they fought alone - the western powers supplied the Soviets with huge amounts of materials and equipment, and the western air and sea offensives choked Nazi Germany's ability to wage war.
Yeah, and the soldiers and citizens of that totalitarian state did the vast majority of the dying on behalf of the cause. Soviet losses at Stalingrad alone are about 25 times what Canada suffered in the entire war, in every theatre.
Without meaning the slightest disrespect to the Western Allies (historical tidbit - the Soviet Union wasn't an "ally", it was a "co-belligerent", but the numbers tell the tale: US losses in WW2 European Theatre were ~104,000 KIA and 448,000 other casualties, whereas USSR military death estimates are between 8.6 million and 11.4 million. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II_casualties_of_the_Soviet_Union#Military_losses
A widely used measure of human wellbeing is the United Nations Human Development Index. It has three dimensions: income, health, and education. While there are many measures to quantify each, the most important ones are
(1) For income, average household income, proportion living in poverty
(2) For health, life expectancy, infant mortality
(3) For education, years of schooling, literacy rates
On all of these measures, Canadians today are much better off than they were fifty or seventy years ago.
I know, I know, things may be good now, but they will get much worse soon. Of course, that's what we were being told fifty years ago.
Indeed, sixty years ago, many experts thought that a nuclear war was imminent. We drilled at school by crouching under our desks while simulating a nuclear attack. Even a 10-year-old realized the uselessness of this, and the despair of the adults recommending it.
Very weak safety net. A spell of unemployment or a major health problem could bankrupt a family.
Work week was 5.5 days or 44 hours, but many jobs required unpaid overtime. In my family, the adults regularly worked 60 hours a week. I helped out with part-time jobs, starting at age 11.
Gasoline had lead additives until the early 1970s. As a result, many baby boomers and early GenX'ers have brain damage. Perhaps that explains us?
Anyway, every generation has its anxieties. It's your turn.
I suspect the sense of decline seems a lot more pronounced when you're a relatively young member of a news industry that's in its death throes, much like auto workers adjusting to the decline of the Big 3 in the 1980s or blue collar oil workers in the past half decade. An early or mid-career engineering or science grad is faced with the same challenges regarding housing costs, but at least doesn't have to contend with a likely prospect of their livelihood fading out of existence.
One other point I'd like to note is regarding the ability to cook, garden, or repair things. In a lot of ways, these are more of an artifact of a brief period of post-war suburbanism and our recent past as settlers. Urban dwellers of the past rarely had the opportunity to do these things. They relied on bakeshops and other businessmen to do their cooking in places like 19th and early 20th century London. Reading about the early settlement of Australia with convicts drawn from urban populations, one is struck by the fact that they almost completely lacked the skills in farming, fishing, construction, and craftsmanship. Urban dwellers have almost always been nearly hopeless when challenged to live without all of the specialized services found in cities.
My thoughts have always been that if most of the people, most of the time have enough (and a little more) or at least what all of those around them have, society remains stable which I think is what you are indicating more eloquently.
Personally I think of history in terms of Toynbee's theory of challenge and response in "A Study of History." Growth comes from responding to a challenge; a society which faces no challenges will stagnate. After responding successfully to a challenge, a society will then find itself facing a new challenge, often a direct result of its earlier response; and so on. (In contrast, a society which fails to respond will find itself facing the same challenge over and over again.)
An obvious example is the economic response to Covid. In Canada, like other Western countries, spending plunged, as people didn't have much to spend money on, while average household income actually increased, thanks to a wide range of income-support programs (like CERB, an emergency version of EI). As a direct result, household savings soared, and money flooded into housing (and other assets, as Mike Moffatt noted in his interview with Matt Gurney: everything from meme stocks to bitcoin to old hockey cards). This is a huge problem for younger first-time homebuyers, who find themselves locked out of the housing market, or borrowing ever-larger amounts of money to get in. Now the challenge is figuring out how to build more housing in places like the GTA and Vancouver (and restrict speculative demand), so it's not so scarce and expensive. https://morehousing.ca/pandemic-savings
A larger-scale challenge is the increasing instability of the international status quo. The US is stepping back to deal with internal issues. Relative power is shifting from those backing the status quo (the US and its allies, including Canada) towards those opposed to it (China, Russia, and a host of smaller powers). This is a novel and disconcerting situation for Canadians - we're not accustomed to getting into diplomatic fights with China, Saudi Arabia, or other powers without the backing of the US. We're going to have to build up our hard and soft power. In a more dangerous world, we need sharper teeth. https://www.economist.com/the-americas/2019/02/09/canada-in-the-global-jungle
Great post, great reminder that those before us have already called us out on what's in store for us. Interestingly I just had finished Tara Henley's new podcast before your column appeared in my inbox https://tarahenley.substack.com/p/bad-news?r=ilfha&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email. Rather timely that these issues are starting to make a bit of a dent. Hoping to see some collaborative efforts in the future. All the best.
"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.”
I think that statement best defines what we can all look forward to, barring the emergence of a new, brave leader willing to fight all of these wrongs. I'm not holding my breath. I'm too old to put on the cape.
I feel the same way, and appreciate as always your clarity. I do take some hope in the idea that the things that really don't work now might be more repairable if they just fall apart, from better fundamentals - especially because it really seems to me that the generations after mine seem way, way better. Crossed fingers in one hand, a drink in the other.
What has amazed me about Hoffer is how accurately he psychoanalyzes so-called progressives. He was dead-on with the Sixties people and he is again now with their woke grandchildren.
Sorry, I've never heard an entire decade tossed together into one kind of people before. By "Sixties People", did you mean:
- The KKK
- The John Birch Society
- Martin Luther King and the NAACP
- Caesar Chavez and the farm workers
- Pentagon Generals who invented the Gulf of Tonkin incident
- Rachel Carson and the first environmentalists against DDT
- Vietnam Veterans Against the War
- Jewish Anti-Defamation League
- Anybody in a Cowboy Western TV show or Movie, (200 produced in the 60s)
- Kent State War Protesters
- AIM, the American Indian Movement (occupied Alcatraz 1969)
- Liberated women wearing miniskirts and wanting into medical school
- Gay men rioting at Stonewall, 1969
- NASA employees. (Believe me, there was nobody more "sixties" than astronauts).
- Absolutely anybody destroying their brains with Mexican Mary-Jew-Wanna.
"The Sixties" was a lot of very different people, not all on the same side. I'm pretty sure the activists who murdered civil rights workers were True Believers, too.
I don't find your recent focus too negative -- it helps me to know there are others who see the alarming trends I see, and are worried about the same things I am worried about.
Entrenched inequality getting worse, unaffordable housing also getting worse, climate and environmental crises, growing authoritarianism (and growing misogyny), a decline in real community connections. A growing sense that our institutions are not really up to the challenges we face, and that they are barely coping with the operational demands of the pandemic.
These are all genuine concerns. We need to be talking about them. We need to start looking for societal levers to make a difference.
Over the holidays, I spoke to a few well-informed individuals who told me they were baffled by the continued health of the stock market, and could see no fundamental basis for it continuing based on general economic indicators. A major correction will only add to social unrest.
I was also advised - again by knowledgeable acquaintances - that we should expect continued inflation on food prices, driven by a wide variety of global forces. This will, of course, hurt those at the bottom the most.
To top it all off, our elephant sized neighbour next door is having some big challenges. We have ridden on their coat tails for so long, we have forgotten that we didn't achieve this security and prosperity all by ourselves. We need to start acting now to make better plans to look out for our own interests on the world stage. Yet this is just one other massive challenge that our governments don't seem to think worth discussion.
So are you being negative? No. You serve your readers well if you can enlighten us on these challenges, and help us be better informed. (I recognize that not all of this is in your wheelhouse!)
Thanks for the thoughtful essays.
Kids. They're hysterical. No memory of the past.
The paragraph about precarious work, being turned into a utility-maximizing drone, could have been lifted from Coupland's Gen-X book. (30 years ago! A whole generation!) I could change a dozen words of the Internet concerns, and produce something that would pass as a critique of Television - which was going to turn my generation into passive, mindless, mouth-breathing drones by 1975, I was assured by TIME and Newsweek.
Speaking of illiberalism and conflict abroad, America finally ended 20 years of pointless war and murder. It was certainly embarrassing that the American officer class was SO stupid, they had to be taught twice about the Mao's "Sixteen Character Formula", but I think they understand now, how irrelevant war-technologies are against populations, as opposed to armies. They'll probably be good for a couple of generations.
As to economic dislocation, nobody even talks about the 2008 financial crisis any more, we're eager to be past it without more grumbling about how no rich people got jailed. The fact is, the economy recovered, except for the 10 million who took permanent financial damage. I dunno how bad even THAT is. When I was 24, (Calgary, 1982) 90% of my company were all fired, every engineer I knew was out of work, there were five pages of "dollar sales" for underwater houses in the Calgary Herald. I filled in 3 years of unemployment getting another degree, while living in sad basement suites through my late 20s. A review of my 40th reunion engineering class indicates we nonetheless all recovered, had successful lives, families, retirements. Across the whole of life, it looks like a speed bump.
If rebuilding our infrastructure around GHG-free technologies proves to be expensive, I assure you it will be relatively less-so than when our modern infrastructure was built for the first time, 1930-1960 for most of it: back then, there was no preexisting industrial base to start from.
Lack of American democracy? Ask Black people who were around for Jim Crow. They've still got a lot more democracy than they had for 90 years.
My grandmother's generation had the Worst War in History, and a global pandemic that killed a few percent of all humanity. They had 10 good years, then 10 years of 30% unemployment and soup kitchens, and their kids had to be fed nonetheless. Then there was ANOTHER greatest war in history, more than twice as bad as the first, and they were required to send their children into it.
So my parents grew up fighting that, then trying to raise their kids under a nuclear threat, and a polio pandemic, where thousands lost the race to get vaccines before they were killed or their limbs withered. (Oh, and a post-war housing shortage that saw them start their marriage in a "boarding house", a concept now so unacceptable that we haven't re-invented it, even to get rid of tent cities. I can show you a picture of 11 or 12 twenty-somethings, "the gang", posing in front of a rather ordinary-sized house with maybe four bedrooms. Mom noted that the one guy who saw a lot of combat did wake them all up when he screamed in his nightmares, but nobody ever mentioned it.)
Bottom line, it won't be remotely as bad as Jen fears, you'll look back at the 2020s and smile at your concerns, the way I smile back at wondering how I'd survive the Great Calgary Recession of 1982-1989.
And if it is, you'll still be fine: you're descended from generations of heroes who sucked up far worse, and got on with not just life, but enjoying life.
Not sure I agree with your Police work there, Lou. 2008 didn't wrap up nice - it led to Trump. Wait til we see what Trump leads to. Nuclear devastation isn't off the table, we're not prepped for the next pandemic, and looking at climate change as a "soon to be fixed" problem of technology and spending is a little over-hopeful. Yes, things have been worse (the Bubonic Plague, asteroids falling on dinosaurs), and life will go on, but the essay didn't say otherwise. You can have your optimism, but don't condescend. It's rude.
Everything leads to something; I only meant that employment recovered, home-ownership rates recovered, gross statistics were pretty pre-2008 when the pandemic hit. (A similar time after 1938 was 1952, a decade of surging economy, so there's precedent. The notion that "most people lost everything and never recovered" lacks objective support, as it would about the Great Depression, where my wife's grandparents lost their farm, but were doing well by 1952.)
As to civility, the entire point of TheLine is to be condescending and critical of every politician and power-figure in sight. I'm sure the journalists can take as well as give. Especially if they want to piss and moan about a coming Age of Decline at people who've been threatened, quite seriously, with nuclear weapons.
Doubling down on the rude - okay. I'm not sure the point of The Line is to be condescending - it reads like journalism and analysis to me, which is not the same thing. I think it's very funny that you claim to have been threatened "quite seriously" by nuclear weapons but can't grant other people's fears about the already-begun climate catastrophe. (Also, lastly - you should quote things accurately if you're going to be pedantic. Lyle said "many", not "most".)
Sigh. "Kids these days don't know from tough" is a 2500-year-old trope, I think that Plato has an example on record. It's now reduced to a familiar comedy line, as my "Kids. They're hysterical" opening - about a 35-year-old mom of two - was intended to convey.
It was richly deserved, for predicting a decade of decline, a coming lifetime not as good as her Mom's, when even a few decades of historical context suggests that recovery will be swift. My own decades, and my parents and grandparents.
As to "rude", are you kidding me? Hard-working public servants aren't called "average performers" in this space, they're called "mediocrities".
It describes itself as "irreverent". Always, in the opinion of those used to reverence, that is "rude", i.e. Trudeau is not "questioned", he is "called on his bullshit", which you probably wouldn't say to your Mom, even if she was bullshitting you at the time.
Most of us would not read them if they were not rude to the powerful - but pushback in kind is fair.
Clearly, you never met my mom. ;)
The experience for immigrants and especially immigrant children is completely different. I suspect Jen's perspective is one of who's family had been in Canada for generations. It isn't her fault of course, being raised by the boomer "Golden Generation" where as long as you didn't make epic life mistakes life got better from year to year, backstopped by debt for things like free health care and OAS, is a hard act to follow. For immigrants, they don't take anything for granted. Good job, home, family, all have to be worked for, it doesn't just happen.
It is interesting though how the US just seems to motor through storm winds on sheer optimism and the benefits of superpower status (Reserve currency machine just prints and prints). I have a hypothesis that I doubt will be proven soon but I think a lot of angst, political and economic issues would be relieved if Canadians could easily move to the US and vice versa. People would be happier living amongst their own "tribe." Let the Canadian gunnies who want cheaper homes live in Montana, let the US left coast sociologists move to Montreal. I think it would be a huge destress for both countries.
We will consider all submissions from immigrants entitled "stop bitching, old stock."
Good essay, by golly.
Minor point about WWII, we joined forces with a very totalitarian force to defeat the other totalitarian forces. Still, I am on your side of the long bet.
Interesting sounding book.
No one means to undermine the efforts of the Soviets in that effort, so fair point! Totalitarianism didn't work out well for them in the long run, however.
The factoid everybody should know about WW2 is that 88% of the German land army who died in that war died at Russian hands.
The whole Western Front was a minor sideshow, by comparison.
Just don't fall for the Soviet assertion that they fought alone - the western powers supplied the Soviets with huge amounts of materials and equipment, and the western air and sea offensives choked Nazi Germany's ability to wage war.
There isn't much chance of a kid of a vet thinking that.
Stalingrad may be the most famous, but the decisive battle was at Kursk. Still the battle with the most tanks ever fought.
Yeah, and the soldiers and citizens of that totalitarian state did the vast majority of the dying on behalf of the cause. Soviet losses at Stalingrad alone are about 25 times what Canada suffered in the entire war, in every theatre.
Without meaning the slightest disrespect to the Western Allies (historical tidbit - the Soviet Union wasn't an "ally", it was a "co-belligerent", but the numbers tell the tale: US losses in WW2 European Theatre were ~104,000 KIA and 448,000 other casualties, whereas USSR military death estimates are between 8.6 million and 11.4 million. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II_casualties_of_the_Soviet_Union#Military_losses
Okay, the grumpy old man in me has been provoked.
A widely used measure of human wellbeing is the United Nations Human Development Index. It has three dimensions: income, health, and education. While there are many measures to quantify each, the most important ones are
(1) For income, average household income, proportion living in poverty
(2) For health, life expectancy, infant mortality
(3) For education, years of schooling, literacy rates
On all of these measures, Canadians today are much better off than they were fifty or seventy years ago.
I know, I know, things may be good now, but they will get much worse soon. Of course, that's what we were being told fifty years ago.
Indeed, sixty years ago, many experts thought that a nuclear war was imminent. We drilled at school by crouching under our desks while simulating a nuclear attack. Even a 10-year-old realized the uselessness of this, and the despair of the adults recommending it.
Very weak safety net. A spell of unemployment or a major health problem could bankrupt a family.
Work week was 5.5 days or 44 hours, but many jobs required unpaid overtime. In my family, the adults regularly worked 60 hours a week. I helped out with part-time jobs, starting at age 11.
Gasoline had lead additives until the early 1970s. As a result, many baby boomers and early GenX'ers have brain damage. Perhaps that explains us?
Anyway, every generation has its anxieties. It's your turn.
I suspect the sense of decline seems a lot more pronounced when you're a relatively young member of a news industry that's in its death throes, much like auto workers adjusting to the decline of the Big 3 in the 1980s or blue collar oil workers in the past half decade. An early or mid-career engineering or science grad is faced with the same challenges regarding housing costs, but at least doesn't have to contend with a likely prospect of their livelihood fading out of existence.
One other point I'd like to note is regarding the ability to cook, garden, or repair things. In a lot of ways, these are more of an artifact of a brief period of post-war suburbanism and our recent past as settlers. Urban dwellers of the past rarely had the opportunity to do these things. They relied on bakeshops and other businessmen to do their cooking in places like 19th and early 20th century London. Reading about the early settlement of Australia with convicts drawn from urban populations, one is struck by the fact that they almost completely lacked the skills in farming, fishing, construction, and craftsmanship. Urban dwellers have almost always been nearly hopeless when challenged to live without all of the specialized services found in cities.
Wow!! What a beautiful essay Jen! Thank you. It was sad, frustrating, disagreeable and yet beautiful and inspiring.
My thoughts have always been that if most of the people, most of the time have enough (and a little more) or at least what all of those around them have, society remains stable which I think is what you are indicating more eloquently.
For anyone who'd like to read "The True Believer" (highly recommended), a scan is available from archive.org: https://archive.org/details/1951-hoffer-the-true-believer/mode/1up
Personally I think of history in terms of Toynbee's theory of challenge and response in "A Study of History." Growth comes from responding to a challenge; a society which faces no challenges will stagnate. After responding successfully to a challenge, a society will then find itself facing a new challenge, often a direct result of its earlier response; and so on. (In contrast, a society which fails to respond will find itself facing the same challenge over and over again.)
An obvious example is the economic response to Covid. In Canada, like other Western countries, spending plunged, as people didn't have much to spend money on, while average household income actually increased, thanks to a wide range of income-support programs (like CERB, an emergency version of EI). As a direct result, household savings soared, and money flooded into housing (and other assets, as Mike Moffatt noted in his interview with Matt Gurney: everything from meme stocks to bitcoin to old hockey cards). This is a huge problem for younger first-time homebuyers, who find themselves locked out of the housing market, or borrowing ever-larger amounts of money to get in. Now the challenge is figuring out how to build more housing in places like the GTA and Vancouver (and restrict speculative demand), so it's not so scarce and expensive. https://morehousing.ca/pandemic-savings
A larger-scale challenge is the increasing instability of the international status quo. The US is stepping back to deal with internal issues. Relative power is shifting from those backing the status quo (the US and its allies, including Canada) towards those opposed to it (China, Russia, and a host of smaller powers). This is a novel and disconcerting situation for Canadians - we're not accustomed to getting into diplomatic fights with China, Saudi Arabia, or other powers without the backing of the US. We're going to have to build up our hard and soft power. In a more dangerous world, we need sharper teeth. https://www.economist.com/the-americas/2019/02/09/canada-in-the-global-jungle
Great post, great reminder that those before us have already called us out on what's in store for us. Interestingly I just had finished Tara Henley's new podcast before your column appeared in my inbox https://tarahenley.substack.com/p/bad-news?r=ilfha&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email. Rather timely that these issues are starting to make a bit of a dent. Hoping to see some collaborative efforts in the future. All the best.
"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.”
I think that statement best defines what we can all look forward to, barring the emergence of a new, brave leader willing to fight all of these wrongs. I'm not holding my breath. I'm too old to put on the cape.
I feel the same way, and appreciate as always your clarity. I do take some hope in the idea that the things that really don't work now might be more repairable if they just fall apart, from better fundamentals - especially because it really seems to me that the generations after mine seem way, way better. Crossed fingers in one hand, a drink in the other.
Hmm. On reading your last paragraph, it occurred to me that we seem to do better when not being told what to do.
Lol😏 speaking of petulance...
What has amazed me about Hoffer is how accurately he psychoanalyzes so-called progressives. He was dead-on with the Sixties people and he is again now with their woke grandchildren.
Not just progressives.
Agreed.
Sorry, I've never heard an entire decade tossed together into one kind of people before. By "Sixties People", did you mean:
- The KKK
- The John Birch Society
- Martin Luther King and the NAACP
- Caesar Chavez and the farm workers
- Pentagon Generals who invented the Gulf of Tonkin incident
- Rachel Carson and the first environmentalists against DDT
- Vietnam Veterans Against the War
- Jewish Anti-Defamation League
- Anybody in a Cowboy Western TV show or Movie, (200 produced in the 60s)
- Kent State War Protesters
- AIM, the American Indian Movement (occupied Alcatraz 1969)
- Liberated women wearing miniskirts and wanting into medical school
- Gay men rioting at Stonewall, 1969
- NASA employees. (Believe me, there was nobody more "sixties" than astronauts).
- Absolutely anybody destroying their brains with Mexican Mary-Jew-Wanna.
"The Sixties" was a lot of very different people, not all on the same side. I'm pretty sure the activists who murdered civil rights workers were True Believers, too.