10th law: It’s not about you

Ten thousand generations have come before you; more will follow

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times,” wrote Charles Dickens at the start of A Tale of Two Cities. He continued the sentence in his run-on way, through several more clauses to the conclusion that “we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way—in short, the period was so far like the present period that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.”

Dickens was writing about the eighteenth century from the mid-nineteenth. But his insight about the two periods perceiving themselves in the superlative might have been written about any age. Infants inhabit the center of their universes, as far as they know. Everything exists to serve their needs. If it didn’t for the most part, they wouldn’t survive. When it doesn’t, they don’t. As children they discover that a world exists beyond their needs. Their parents don't always come the moment they cry. Most manage this decentering without psychological trauma. Those parents who do continue to cater to their children’s demands do the young ones no favor. The parents won’t be there forever. The world won’t be so solicitous.

Generations face the same decentering struggle. Each generation tends to see itself as the object of history’s unfolding. Every culture has an origin story, and the story usually culminates in the present, whenever that present happens to be. Certain origin stories of a religious bent  allow for an extension into the future, often ending in apocalypse. But the present generation is always on the main road to that end.

Charles Darwin supplied a secular origin story, which likewise allowed for continuation into the future. Yet most of the interpreters and consumers of Darwin’s theory confined their attention to how evolution had produced the present. Everyone wanted to know who or what were our prehuman ancestors, not who or what would be our posthuman descendants.

The social Darwinists, the ones who applied evolution most directly, if tendentiously, to history, explained how competition among cultures and races had led to the triumph of the friends and kin of those doing the explaining. They acknowledged that the struggle continued, but they scarcely entertained the idea that they might be displaced from the pinnacle of the pyramid—unless society ignored the stern lessons of evolutionary science.

Keepers of morality rarely consider themselves Darwinists, at least not on morality. Yet they often operate on the same principle. Each generation acts as though its moral code is the best there ever was. They sometimes forgive the sins of previous generations, contending that those generations knew no better. Often they don’t, instead ungraciously casting condemnation from their peak of perfection down upon those who helped them get to the summit.

There can be a performative, prophylactic aspect to this. I must be the quickest to condemn lest I be accused myself. It’s an old, sad story. Henry Ward Beecher zealously defended Christian teaching on the family while sleeping with the wives of members of his Brooklyn congregation. Some of the most vocal homophobes have been closeted gay people.

Yet much is sincere. People gravitate toward those who share their values. Surrounded by the like-minded, they convince themselves that they are the right-minded. Looking back in history and discovering people who had different values, they judge them wrong-minded.

Some of the judgments are silly and inconsequential. We roll our eyes at fashions in clothing that have gone out of style. Our taste, of course, will prove timeless.

Part of the phenomenon can be ascribed to simple narcissism. Dickens's formula encompasses the bad as well as the good. In America, partisanship is said to be worse today than at any previous time in the country's history. Individual Americans imagine they are more stressed than their parents and grandparents.

Not so. Partisanship is no worse today than it was in the 1790s, and less deadly than it became in the 1850s and early 1860s. Our parents were fully as stressed as we are. It's just that we were kids then and didn't notice. 

Part of the myopia is more significant. America fought seven wars since 1917 in the name of democracy. During that time, American officials have taken the position that democracy is the last word in political organization, the end toward which all other forms ought to gravitate—or be made to gravitate, if necessary.

For a time, history seemed to cooperate. Democracy spread slowly in the nineteenth century, a bit faster in the first half of the twentieth century, and then rapidly in the second half. But the twenty-first century has been a period of democratic disillusionment. Russia reverted from budding democracy to raging autocracy. India, the bellwether of democracy in the developing world, has developed antidemocratic features. China resisted democratizing all together. In America many people have less faith in democracy than they used to.

Likewise on personal rights. In the 1960s the spread of individual rights appeared unstoppable in America. Many people who campaigned successfully for civil rights assumed that an equal rights amendment for women would be a slam dunk. But just before a proposed amendment attained the support of the necessary three-quarters of the states, a backlash developed and stopped it. Today the chances that such an amendment could even get out of Congress are minimal. In the early 1970s the Supreme Court discovered in the Constitution a right of privacy that entailed a right to abortion. Fifty years later the court changed its mind.

Even on its face, the notion that we somehow sit at the apex of history is far-fetched. We are approximately the ten-thousandth generation of Homo sapiens. We stand in a long line—and not at the end of the line but in the middle. There will be many generations after us. Doomsayers who contend otherwise fall straight into the superlative trap. We alone, they say, of all the generations of humans have the ability to destroy our species.

No, we don't. A major nuclear war might kill hundreds of millions. But that would leave several billion living, and they would be resourceful enough to survive the aftermath. Climate change might become very disruptive, and it will certainly cause the extinction of less resilient species than ourselves. But H. sapiens will muddle through.

In the end, we're just another generation. Better in some ways than previous generations. Worse in others. Not the best. Not the worst.

Take that, Chuck.

See the other laws of history at https://hwbrands.substack.com/p/the-laws-of-history-165