I grew up, I think, at the climax of the Enlightenment, which had begun several centuries earlier. By Enlightenment I mean above all the idea that human reason could improve human life, economically, medically, and politically. That was, as my new book shows quite clearly, the idea upon which the United States was founded, and the idea which our greatest presidents tried to sustain amidst changing circumstnaces, including a civil war fought over slavery, a great depression, two world wars, and a worldwide ideological struggle between communist dictatorship and capitalist democracy. The ideas of the Enlightenment did not create a utopia, partly because science, in particular, allowed humanity to do both good and evil on an unprecedented scale. On the one hand, advances in medicine, food production, and industry mutliplied the world's population again and again. On the other hand, advances in military technology, culminating in the atomic bomb, allowed for unprecendented levels of destruction, and still threaten the complete destruction of civilization. And last but hardly least, humanity has never really managed to substitute reason for primal emotion. Those two critical aspects of human nature have remained at war, and what distinguishes the period roughly of 1750-1968 is that reason, on the whole, had the upper hand, and that kept the dream of the Enlightenment alive.
I knew by the mid-1970s that something had gone very wrong in American political life in the late 1960s, and that the nation had lost the capacity to focus on the common good, partly because of the Vietnam War. By the 1980s I had come to accept that we had lost something, and I did an interview late in the Reagan era that showed that I had shed many of my youthful illusions. (I still have it, but I would have to retype the whole think to link it, and I don't think it's worth the trouble.) The fall of Communism and the return of the Democrats to power under Clinton seemed to promise a brighter future. Then, around 1995, I read Generations and suddenly saw the past, the present, and the future in a new light. The erosion of civic order that had begun in the late 1960s, Strauss and Howe taught me, was a reucrring phenomenon, which had been followed in the 1860s and the 1930s and 1940s by a rebirth of unity in pursuit of new, inspring values. They confidently expected to see something similar in the first fifteen years or so of the new century, and I welcomed that hope myself.
In fact, between 2001 and 2020, the nation experienced not one, but three crises of the type that they had predicted: 9/11, the 2008 financial crisis and the Great Recession, and the COVID pandemic. None of them, however, had the regenerative effect that they had predicted. George W. Bush, probably encouraged by Karl Rove, tried to mobilize the nation on behalf of a generational crusade to spread democracy through the Middle East, but he couldn't bring himself to ask the mass of the population for a real sacrifice via a draft or tax increases, and his goals were as unachievable as our parents' were in Vietnam. Ben Bernanke, Larry Summers and Tim Geithner--Boomers all--persauded Barack Obama that there was nothing wrong with our economy that a massive infusion of liquidity couldn't cure. Donald Trump tried to ignore the pandemic at first, and he and Biden dealt with its economic effects with another massive infusion of cash that tended to benefit industry and local government. Meanwhile, teachers unions insisted on closing schools, a step whose disastrous effects may persist for a decade or more. These repeated failures and an extraordinary growth of tribalism have left us with a polarized, divided electorate, which has transferred the control of either the White House or at least one hosue of Congress in eight of the last nine national elections and is very likely to do the same again this November.
Meanwhile, two new ideologies have replaced the idea of using reason to advance the common good. The first was, very simply, the profit motive and the revolt of our economic elite against the New Deal order, whose prophets were Milton Friedman and Lewis Powell, whose famous memorandum, written just before he went on the Supreme Court, called for an attack on the regulatory state and a rebirth of the values of free enterprise. The second, which began in academia but has now spread to many of our important institutions, was the tribal revolt against the idea of equal justice and equal opportunity for all, which new ideologies branded as nothing more than an excuse for the domiation of straight white males. Any presidential candidate who genuinely sought to build a new majority coalition would have to take on at least one of those ideologies, and probably both of them--and no such candidate is on the horizon. The spread of those ideologies made the kind of regeneracy that Strauss and Howe counted on impossible, and that, in turn, establishes the late 1960s as a critical turning point in world history.
The age of the Enlightenment, I believe, was an heroic age. Its spirit encouraged both journalists and historians to see public affairs as a story of progress, and perhaps to try to use history and journalism to further progress. Journalists and historians, by and large, now use their platforms to push their own ideology, which they identify with progress. Unfortunately, I believe, on many fronts, the era of progress has come to an end, and academics and journalists, with rare exceptions, are simply promoting an ideology--or at times, their own superior wisdom--rather than facing facts. They still claim to have the answers that will make our lives better, but the mass of our people have learned the hard way that they no longer do.
The gap between ideology and reality is also behind much of the growing division over the Middle East. Both supporters of the Israeli govenrment and of the Palestinian revolt believe that their cause must triumph because it is just, and this blinds them to the real tragedy of two peoples of roughly the same size claiming the right to control the same piece of land. This is the kind of tribal conflict which Enlightenment principles cannot solve, either. Yes, a two-state solution would reflect those principles--but the political authorities on the two sides reject one, and I suspect that majorities of their constituents do, as well.
This fall will mark the twentieth anniversary of History Unfoolding. Much of it, particularly for the first six years or so, was written in the Enlightenment spirit--in the belief that better ideas could make a difference. I am trying to let that idea go now, and it isn't easy. We live in a tragic era rather than an heroic one now, and I no longer expect to live to see a great rebirth, even if I can live to be 100. Yet as the great German historian Ranke tried to tell us nearly 200 years ago, we must accept all human history as reflective of some divine plan--as he put it--or as Thucydides said, as reflective of human nature. We can value the eras that have made civilization and modern life possible even in a long era of entropy and decline, and we can keep certian non-monetary, non-tribal values alive in our own lives. Some day new generations will revive the Enlightenment values in all their glory, bulding on the 18th and 20th centuries as those times built on antiquity. And meanwhile, as Orwell once said, the earth continues to revolve around the sun.