Death and Ideas

History, so they say, repeats itself. Why? Institutional power is difficult to change. Why? Possibly for the same reason: Mortality.

Read through the immediate contemporaries of Marx and Dostoevsky and you’ll see arguments crop up that look frighteningly familiar. Worries about globalization, loss of the small-scale workforce, pernicious immigration, the impersonality of technology, things like this. The period of before the First World War was a flowering of activity, reform, and ideas that seems to have been entirely forgotten. Arguments about residential dispersion and urban living date all the way back to the advent of the street car, yet seem to recur as original ideas to the anti-automotive crowd today. The problem may be that true continuity lasts only as long as memory.

For centuries, generations were relatively short, as lifespan wasn’t what it is today. This meant turnover of intellectual capital every fifty years or so. Even today, reformers rage against a system or policy without ever seeming to ask, “now, why was this done in the first place?” The shift from generation to generation, forgetting the logic that created the world of their birth, seems to be the natural flow that creates the Hegelian dialectic of which uncle Karl was so fond. (Although he certainly didn’t see it that way.) I often wonder if the great cold warriors of the last generation could have been transported back to the world of Hapsburg and Prussian Europe if they wouldn’t have gone a totally different direction. There is history written, but it can’t capture the mood and feel of the time – the assumptions made, the great fears of the time, the social traumas that created collective phobia that drove public opinion. When those that remember a time die, the real lessons from that time “we tried this, because that was a problem,” die as well. I wonder if the great communards of the 1960s realized that they were the modern inheritors of the Fourierists of a hundred years before.

Conversely, sometimes there just isn’t enough death. It been said that progress happens one funeral at a time; this based on the observation that a new idea often requires not changing the mind of the existing system (scientists, intellectuals, what have you,) but rather the ascendance of the next generation that were receptive of the new ideas before becoming set in their ways. Now, people are living longer. Not only that, but morbidity has decreased to a rate that it’s not unusual to have codgers in their eighties milling around the boardroom and refusing to leave. As the age of retirement (of people who like being there) grows older and older, the generations below them exist in a sort of extended adolescence, unable to affect the system until they’re ancient enough to become inflexible themselves. For instance: Mike Wallace is just too damn old. However effective he may be, is it really the best thing for journalism to have a prominent spokesman working from the mindset of the Nixon administration? Fresh blood is not simply youth, it’s someone from a different perspective that’s been able to have enough experiences while young enough for them to make a difference. This isn’t possible while sitting around for forty years waiting for the old guy to finally kick off.
The miracles of modern medicine have given us a legion of baby boomers, minds still unconsciously rooted in a world of North American monopoly from 1962, that refuse to either pass the baton or learn from the mistakes of their grandparents and great-grandparents. Frustrating