The denouement?

[pbrower2a]

(08-16-2022, 10:18 AM)David Horn Wrote:

(08-15-2022, 07:37 PM)pbrower2a Wrote: Two roads diverge at some point in a 4T. One leads to disgrace and ruin, personal or national. Another leads to a wholesome result. Maybe it isn't perfect; the generational theory suggests that even what people see as the optimum changes predictably in a cyclical way.

Note: the 1950s (better known as the Ideal World) had plenty of racial issues, including lynchings, plenty of demagogues, including Robert Welch and Joe McCarthy and plenty of lesser but still effective social inhibitors -- ask anyone who belonged to the "wrong" church.  The last 4T stated from REALLY BAD, and ended with still bad but kinda, sorta better.  I doubt we get more this time either -- assuming that the 4T resolves on a high note. of course.

All Crises leave behind some unanswered questions, many of those from before the Crisis because the victors themselves have their own vices that they need not contemplate. Early capitalism was extremely exploitative, and the American Civil War in no way resolved that. If you wish to discuss race relations in the failure of Reconstruction -- that failure may have led to the rise of the concept of Aryan superiority with all the ensuing evil that culminated in the Holocaust. If Southern blacks had gotten a reasonable chance to thrive as capitalists as they tried to do, then white racism would have been shattered as a foundation of any ideology. Instead that white racism festered as antisemitism, and we all know where that went. Nazi Jew-hating was above all else racist in theory. 

The aftermath of the Second World War left much of Europe with shattered institutions that local "pupils of Stalin" could overthrow with the aid of Soviet military and political influence. Mao's Communists overthrew what had been a government consistently allied with the US but with a weak hold on the country. Howe and Strauss did not complete even Generations until 1989;  a work similar to theirs might have suggested that the Crisis of 2020 could easily be the Cold War in what might have been billed on the opposing sides as the Final Struggle between Communism and Capitalism, most likely ending in some Gotterdammerung in which ends with the obliteration of a huge fraction of the human population and the destruction of every achievement since the Stone Age. All in all, it is a good thing that things did not so turn out. 

This can be said of the stolid time following the Second World War: it had its faults, but there was clear progress on race relations, even if those include some horrible incidents such as the murder of Emmitt Till and the unconscionable bombing of the Eighth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama. Yes, that "fine Christian organization" according to its self description showed its support for Christianity by bombing a church. Truman desegregated the Armed Forces. Brown v. Board of Education negated the oxymoronic concept of "separate but equal". 

The 1T allowed the children of the time to grow up able to make their own decisions on Right and Wrong. Kids heard their grandparents talk about wintering in Florida, but while Florida is boring, the trip along 1 to and from New York City (or Philadelphia or Boston) , 21 to and from Cleveland, 23 to and from Greater Detroit, or 41 to and from Chicago or Milwaukee led the grandparents through the ugly underbelly of American life... Jim Crow. What was the point of separate water fountains, and why were there signs that read "No Negroes Served here"? Such tales likely fed the Freedom Summer. The 1T created that foundation. The struggle for civil rights for Southern blacks led to other struggles -- even to anti-Communist dissent in central and Balkan Europe... and LGBT rights.
     

Quote:Assuming you agree that this 4T is a shadow of the ACW, which wasn't really resolved positively either, the best we get, apparently, is "some improvement".  After all, history is a process, and we're just sitting out our little piece of it.  "Success" is probably permanently illusive.

Americans (and others) solved lots of problems over the seventy-five years since Hitler offed himself in a fetid bunker as the Soviet Army approached.  Maybe this time we have few advances in human rights beyond what we achieved with Obama as President. (Trump is a pure reverse, and he is being reversed). We do have AGW staring us in our faces, and if you thought that either World War II was factually horrific or  that a heated explosion of the Cold War would have been nasty, then contemplate what Anthropogenic Global Warming can do. I start with agriculture, not the most glamorous of economic activities but the one that underpins everything else. People can do wondrous things with software engineering, but software engineers must be fed if they are to do what they do well. So must everyone else. Cut the food supply while the world population expands and you have the basis of thermonuclear warfare or mass starvation.  

I get ahead of myself. We really need two things to stave off a horrific next 4T. First is Zero Population Growth; second is putting an end to the pointless exercise of conspicuous consumption that devours energy and other resources and generates waste heat. Status symbols, we must recognize, are not wealth but instead its waste, especially when they are cheap to manufacture and distribute.  We will have wondrous technology to simulate a visual paradise in certifiably-crappy areas.  We will not need to commute as much.

We had the equivalent of a shooting war in COVID-19 (regrettably it is not over) with over one million deaths in America alone. I cannot yet say that the Russo-Ukrainian war will not spill over.

This Crisis has proved almost entirely political and cultural. If I am to judge the political quality, then I see an analogy between Obama and the first two terms of FDR as leadership. Maybe we would have been far better off with a third term of Barack Obama than the dreadful four years of the Trump nightmare. We are yet to fully escape the shadow of Donald Trump. This said, the law is winning against Trump criminality. We are a nation of laws, and under a President who recognizes such, things can go rather smoothly. When we have a President who tries to be a dictator we have huge problems. 

Weird things happen at the end of a Crisis, and the weirdness sticks.