A Longer View Back

Reading Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone, struck me as a good opportunity to think about history. The book is full of graphs with this shape, recording everything from union membership to the PTA to the titular bowling. Almost all of them follow this general path. What they accidentally point out is the singularity of the immediate post-war decades in the U.S. There seem to be many graphs around of data that start at this period, but seldom do they show the entire century (or longer) to give the period any context. As I’ve said before, there seems to be a baby boomer tendency to begin all data at mid-century, and record everything thereafter as effect. Decline in union membership, crime statistics, inequality, and just about any other perceived ill you can think of always starts downhill from there. Looking at these longer graphs, however, show that the aberration was the mid-century peak – worth noting as a near-monopoly position of power as the developed world was rebuilding from a bombed-out ruin and the two-power equilibrium of the ‘70s and ‘80s had yet to develop – and that the more representative times were possibly the 1900s or 1880s. These, after all, were more egalitarian globalized worlds dealing with rapid change on a number of chaotic fronts. The problem with generational shift (also a theme in the book,) is the failure to remember (or research) the world before one’s childhood. The ‘50s and ‘60s may have been pleasant times to be a child, but they certainly shouldn’t be used as the yardstick for “normal.”

See also: forget me not, death and ideas, and traveling in time