Hope and Contradictions

Paul McCartney’s “Yesterday”  was playing when I woke up on Monday. My head music almost always conveys a message.  What came to mind was Barak Obama’s electoral victory in 2008.  Yesterday.

My spouse Phyllis and I were with the owners and friends in Jackie’s restaurant in Silver Spring, Maryland, well after closing, tears of joy running down our faces. Many tears later – of anger, frustration, disappointment, and fear – it is easy to feel that everything has gone downhill or been ripped apart since then.  A seriously deranged successor as president, a revival of racism and police killings of black youth, nature’s violence unleashed by un-interrupted global warming, immigrants warehoused in tents in northern Mexico, a lethal assault on a woman’s right to choose and on hard-won LGTBQ+ freedoms, Ukraine torn apart by a vicious and criminal Russian assault, the unravelling of American democracy under attack from an increasingly authoritarian Republican Party.

My soul seeks a do-over, starting with those tears of joy, with the hope embedded in that moment.

And yet… History tells me hope is not dead.  At least, my view of history.  I am an amateur Hegelian and an amateur student of Marx, who either stood Hegel on his head (if you prefer Hegel), or on his feet (if you think the material world drives history).

At the core of what these two wrote is what gives me hope: a view that human history moves through “contradictions.”  In my lay-speak, history does not move progressively (inevitably forward) or regressively (endlessly backward). It is not linear (to paraphrase Faulkner, it is not even history).  It is more cyclical, moving through contradictions into moments of progress and moments of regress.

This idea of “contradictions” is important. Going backward is interdependent, interactive with movement forward.  Change happens because of this causal interdependence.  Out of what is happening now a contradictory, opposite trend is being born.  So, I am always looking for the green shoots of the contradiction growing up through what seems to be the solid pavement of today’s trend.

To illustrate, let’s go back to Obama.  The first Black president in America, a potential revolution in American political history.  The transformative power of his election not only gave us hope, it also helped set in motion a regressive reaction that led directly to the Trump campaign message, one built on racism and white resentment, always present in America.  More deeply, the Trump resentment reflected a deep fear in many white Americans about the evolution of the country into a truly multi-ethnic democracy. The Obama victory called forth its own contradiction.

For me, the slender shoots of hope are also embedded in that fearful reaction.  It is easy to feel fatalistic as political forces point toward Republican victories in November.  But out of the killings of Black youth we have seen a powerful mobilization from Black Lives Matter to the progressive caucus in the Congress, to sudden visibility for Black writers, artists, actors, poets, dancers, and political leaders.  One trend calls forth the other.

Such contradictory forces have been at play throughout our history.  I am a child of the 40’s and 50’s, a deadly era of grey flannel suits, suburban sprawl, the average American family (all white), Rosemary Clooney, Doris Day, and that dreadful radio insult to Black America, Amos and Andy.  A time when America threw its weight around the world, toppling governments as it went.

That era inspired its own contradiction.  One early, green shoot out of the pavement was the 1954 Supreme Court decision - Brown v. Board of Education – ordering the desegregation of America’s public schools.  The civil rights movement was another contradiction.  It, too, carried its own contradiction: when Lyndon Johnson pushed civil rights legislation through the Congress, building on that movement, he knew, even then, he was kissing goodbye to the Southern racist wing of the Democratic Party.  Nixon’s “Southern Strategy” exploited the opening. 

The anti-Vietnam War movement, in which I participated, was a contradictory trend given birth by the growing American military intervention into that country.

The same phenomenon can be seen today.  American government has failed to confront the challenge of global warming.  But the warming itself is incentivizing the contradictory trend.  The solar and wind industries are booming; oil companies are hedging their bets with investments in renewable energy, and the coal industry continues to die, Joe Manchin notwithstanding.

The struggle for gay marriage and LGTBQ+ rights, stalled for decades if not centuries, made unimaginable progress in the last 15 years.  And inevitably, that progress engendered a contradictory trend that we now see in Republican and evangelical efforts to strip away those rights and lock the door against widespread acceptance of LGTBQ+ rights, especially those for trans-gender people.

Labor organizing reveals the same pattern. After 75 years of public and private success in dismantling the political and economic power of labor unions in America, the shoots of a new organizing movement are now appearing at Starbucks and Amazon. 

Internationally, 70 years of American domination of the global economy and global security inevitably ushered forth a “rebalancing” of global power.  The rise of China, the hostility of Russia, both demanding to “change the rules” of a system in which the US was the leading country writing the rules, was inevitable.  No single power was going to dominate the system for very long; in fact, the 50 years from 1945 to 1995 were a pretty long run. 

The contradiction began to appear as early as the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union.  The Cold War was the glue that held American global dominance together. Power began to disperse as if a centrifugal force had been unleashed.  The American invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan accelerated this redistribution of power.

I think we can view the assault on American democracy the same way.  The Republican Party and its funders seem bent on creating an alternative, authoritarian America dominated by one party rule.  It is easy to become fearful as this trend appears to sweep the land.  But we need to ask if this authoritarian excess carries the seeds of its contradiction, a reassertion of democracy.

I am not suggesting that this is a mechanical system in which humans have no agency.  The contradictory trend is expressed through human agency; people respond, regroup, resist.  As Marx said: “[People] make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.”  Circumstances generate human activity and response; the activity creates the change.

In sum, history is not a one-way street, even today’s political and economic history.  I can’t say where or how the contradictions will arise or where they will move, but they can be observed.  As the Danish physicist Niels Bohr once said, “prediction is very difficult, especially if it's about the future!” I am certain they will come.

It’s not a matter of faith, but of action, action set in the circumstances of a given moment in time.  There is lots of room for human effort here. 

The ultimate wisdom about contradictions, of course, comes from the late Sidney Morgenbesser, philosophy professor at Columbia University and notorious shpritzer.  Once, in a lecture, a student asked him if he believed in the theory of contradictions.  He replied: “I do and I don’t.”

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Bonus observation: Read a fantastic article in the NYT about the Ukrainian and Russian languages and the coining of a new term for Russian fascism. At:https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/22/magazine/ruscism-ukraine-russia-war.html?referringSource=articleShare