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.