Just as in 1929, we now live in
an economy that is living wildly beyond its means, depending on greater
and greater fools to keep bidding up governments', corporations' and
citizens' paper wealth. Just as in 1929, everyone is borrowing to buy,
either in the hope that they can sell later for a profit (because it is
the only way they can hope to increase their net worth), or because it
is the only way they can buy at all. And just as in 1929, it is
unsustainable, and will lead to a sudden severe reversal followed by a
decade (or more, this time) of ever-worsening conditions, except for
upper-income (six-figure, this time) earners.
I've just finished reading Pierre Berton's The Great Depression,
the definitive history of the 1929-1939 depression. In Part Two of this
article tomorrow I'm going to map the behaviours of that era onto the
realities of the early 21st century, and tell a story of what life in
the next Depression could well be like. Berton's depiction of the last
Depression is one of spectacular political blundering and
pig-headedness, and a mean-spiritedness that permeates the whole
society. So today I want to explore whether (and if so, how) the attitudes
of people (elected, management and grassroots) to their fellow humans
are significantly different from what they were seventy years ago. The
human effect of a Depression is, after all, as much a matter of how we treat each other as the economic variables that conspire to convert seeming affluence to staggering and protracted misery.
In 1929, the class-conscious society that had existed more or less for
millennia was still a reality. While slavery was no longer legal,
racism was still very common and overt. Notwithstanding the message of
the Statue of Liberty, new immigrants were treated suspiciously and as
second-class citizens, when they were allowed citizenship at all.
Anti-Semitism was rampant (and had been for decades), and hatred and
distrust of other religions and cultures was considered quite 'normal'
by most citizens. Segregation, at least until a group was assimilated,
was the accepted and preferred reality. Women in the US and Canada had
only just achieved full suffrage (in Quebec they would not achieve it
until 1940). Economic class distinctions were sharp, and there was a
general assumption by those in power that the 'lower classes' were lazy
and needed to be supervised and bullied to perform. Opposition by
management to organized labour was virulent, and the government and
police forces had no qualms about putting down civil strife violently.
Anti-Communist sentiment was uniformly high, had been for years, and
organized religions, mainstream political parties and social
organizations all preached the dangers of the 'red menace'. The
affluence we attribute to the 'roaring twenties' was that of a minority
elite only, but then that had been the norm since the start of the
Industrial Revolution. Everyone else was deeply in debt, part of the
deliberate process of keeping the middle and lower classes in line. The
middle classes were the ones who tried to leverage their debts into
wealth through the stock market, and were especially hard hit by its
collapse. Economic Disparity between rich and poor was massive, with
managers earning comfortable 5-figure incomes while many workers'
annual incomes (there was no minimum wage, no unemployment insurance or
labour protections) were only in the high 3-figures.
One could argue that most of this is still true today, except that the
economic, religious, racial and cultural animosity is mostly tacit
rather than overt, and, thanks to automation and other 'productivity'
technologies that are taking resources from future generations to meet
the needs and wants of people today, the economic prosperity of all
social classes in affluent nations, adjusted for purchasing power, is
proportionally better, though the disparity is as large as ever.
Culture is all about mastery -- domination, imperialism, control, and
restrictions on behaviour. It can be argued that we humans have three
masters, fighting for control of us:
- Micro-masters: The organisms that make up our bodies and which evolved our minds as a "feature-detection system" for their collective benefit. Stewart and Cohen argue that our brains, and our minds (the processes that our
neurons, senses and motility organs carry out collectively) are their
(our bodies' organisms') information-processing system, not 'ours'. By
the time 'we' have started to think what to do, our micro-masters have
generally already made up 'our' minds.
- Meta-masters: Our culture and society
is constantly attempting to make us like everyone else, to conform to
and believe what others believe, for the preservation of law and order
of the society. In times of low stress, we tend to obey our
micro-masters; as stress increases, these impulses are over-ruled by
the rules of our meta-masters, in their
perceived collective interest. Edward Hall, in his studies of
experiments with rats, found that in periods of high stress, conflict,
coercion and social hierarchy soar, as the group sacrifices the welfare
of the whole for the survival of the elite. The alphas, with the
complicity of the rest, hoard for themselves, so that at least a few
can survive the crisis and perpetuate the species. It could be argued
that modern civilization is a constant high-stress environment, which
is why our human meta-masters now exert so much influence over us, and
treat us so badly.
- Macro-master: Gaia, the collective organism that is all life on Earth.
If you buy the Gaia theory (as most scientists now do), there is a
higher level of intelligence at work on our planet, a complex,
adaptive, self-managed intelligence that recognizes the
inter-dependence of all life on Earth and its ecosystems and therefore
the need to balance our numbers and behaviours for the collective
well-being of all. We were presumably once attuned to this intelligence
and accepting of its wisdom, limiting our numbers and our destruction
of other life accordingly. But other than a vague sense of biophilia,
judging from our behaviour our awareness of this master has long
vanished from human consciousness, or at least been effectively
sublimated.
The argument about where 'free will' fits into this, if indeed we have any free will at all, is best left for another day.
So what happens when an economic depression hits? Suddenly the stress
level is increased by an order of magnitude, the poor begin to fear for
their very survival, and there is no longer any assurance that there is
'enough to go around', so the rich and powerful begin to hoard and to
repress the poor and weak to ensure they do not rise up so there is not
enough for anyone. Indeed,
Berton asserts that the Great Depression could equally be called the
Great Repression, so great was the physical, social and cultural
clampdown on the masses, and the steadfast refusal to invest tax
dollars or incur deficits to relieve the human misery of the time. That
refusal, Berton says, was not deliberate cruelty, but rather
ideological -- the economists of the time (Keynes was not yet in vogue)
believed that government intervention and government spending in
economic turndowns would worsen the situation, and the political wisdom
was that giving people anything for free would make them lazy and
unmotivated to work and lead to communism. It was neocon ideology, and
it was ubiquitous among the ruling classes (and the political parties
in their thrall) at that time, except for the extraordinary
administration of FDR.
In fact, there were at the time three competing ideologies, all of them
idealistic, and all espoused, more and more loudly as the crisis
worsened, as the solution for the society's ills, by men (women were
not taken seriously in politics in those days) who were both arrogant
and ambitious -- laissez-faire
neoconservatism, communism, and fascism. This toxic combination of
qualities -- fanatic idealism, arrogance and ambition -- produced some
of the most despotic, extreme and dangerous 'leaders' the world had
ever known, swept into power on populist platforms that preyed on the
utter desperation and learned helplessness of the people. When
moderation seems inadequate and ineffectual to deal with extreme
suffering, extremism flourishes.
Could this happen today, or are we more reasoned, better equipped, more
suspicious of simplistic idealism and ideology? Is it already
happening? Will the collapse of the dollar, precipitated by the
staggering incompetence and fanatic, dim-witted ideology of the Bush
regime, inevitably bring about the Fourth Turning? Or will our 21st century ingenuity, pragmatism, connectedness,
collective wisdom, resilience, lead us to a quick and radical
correction of the excesses that produce the coming Depression, and
hence a rapid and relatively painless end to it? And is this all
complicated by the fact that this time, unlike 1929, we are facing
permanent, absolute ends to the critical resources on which our society relies for its existence?
My answers to these questions in Part Two tomorrow. |
MADE IN CANADA
trust your
instincts 
