The woe cup runneth over this week. I’ve shared my hot takes already elsewhere on social media, so it’s time for me to slow down and think a bit.
It is plain that in the United States—and perhaps other existing sovereignties—political and social power are converging on some kind of transition of a fairly substantial kind. We all of us live in the moment, and in the moment, our attention is seized by details like “they’re not here to hurt me” or the Supreme Court majority’s disturbingly recurrent invocation of 17th Century English social and institutional life as the determining precedent supporting their assault on contemporary American norms and rights. But understanding whether we are approaching some kind of dramatic rupture—and what will determine how that rupture plays out—takes a longer view.
That ought to be one of the things that I can do readily as a trained historian, but it is difficult to tear myself away, to step back from the horror and anger and perform a less reactive audit of this moment.
The way to work myself to that goal is to think as historians do about past moments of (seemingly) sudden political and social transition, to step into cases where distance provides some cooling insulation from the heat of our moment, where I can make more uncertain what today seems depressingly inevitable. Let’s try the following:
The French Revolution
The “Scramble for Africa”
The granting of the franchise to women in liberal democracies
The rise of fascism in Europe
1968 as a global moment
Each of these have attracted the attention of numerous historians who have raked over small details and engaged in sustained debates about the entirety of the event and about a huge array of specific questions and problems. What I want to do here is to work on the wide-angle viewpoint and see what questions about our present situation might be underscored or emphasized as a result.
Thought #1. At the site of any event, moment or period that has commonly been described as a sharp break or transition in human life, historians end up in long-running debates about whether there was in fact any such break. Some scholars of the French Revolution end up emphasizing grounding the events of 1789-1799 in the previous 150 years of political and social change in France, in Paris, in Europe more generally—in the waning fortunes of a landed aristocracy, in the rise of a bourgeoisie shaped by the Atlantic world, in the contradictory consequences of state centralization under powerful monarchs, in the rising expectations of urban Parisians, in the “forbidden best-sellers” of an exuberant print culture, in the rise of humanism. Others insist that the microhistory of the Revolution itself retains its central importance and that the Revolution was serendipitous and contingent, the outcome of many individual and institutional decisions that could have gone other ways. Still others argue that it was both a break with the past and yet also didn’t change that much, that the French state and society “snapped back” into deeper structures and patterns after the overthrow of Napoleon.
There are similar conversation about each these other moments of apparent transition. What does that help me with in thinking about our wretched present moment? First, it directs me to ask: what in this moment has potentially deep roots? In what ways might the sense that we’re undergoing a transition or a break be incorrect? If there are deep roots, what are they? (We should be as studious as we can manage in thinking about that: e.g., the idea that the French Revolution has roots not in Rousseau but in other kinds of “forbidden best-sellers”, including pornography, makes perfect sense when you read scholars on this point, but it takes the research work to get to that point, as the French Revolution’s narration of itself in its moment would not suggest this line of thought.)
Second, it asks me to think: what might not be changing at all in this moment, but remaining largely continuous? What if this is only a transition or a break on its noisy surface? Are liberal states really changing in profound ways? What are those? Are social transformations really about to be reversed through punitive actions? Would an authoritarian coup in the U.S. and other similar take-overs in other states really last?
Third, it makes me think of what the criteria might be for declaring that something really was (or is) a genuine break or rupture. What we mean by that usually is that some event unfolded in a contingent way (e.g., that it did not have to happen, that it could have happened differently, that the particular decisions and actions of particular individuals and groups intensified and amplified into a society-wide transformation in ways they didn’t intend or even understand) or perhaps that some development had a sharp transformational effect over a very short duration that cascaded far beyond the development itself (e.g., the industrial reorganization of work combined with industrial technologies of production).
Thought #2. What is it like to live through breaks or sudden transitions? Are people always aware that they are doing so? Do they realize in time to plausibly shape the transition one way or the other? What did they say about the reasons why it’s all happening? Is there some group of past “them” who saw it very differently or who barely even noticed it was all happening?
I think with each of these, there definitely were participants who understood themselves to be in the middle a tumultuous, profound shift between their recent past and possible futures. That is the ground zero source of how we came to understand these five items as major transition points, which is some set of participants declaring from within these events that they were witnessing, experiencing or causing a major shift or rupture with the past. All five of these attracted both celebratory and negative commentary at the time, and that commentary often mobilized new groups of people to participate or oppose what was happening.
In some cases, the framing offered by original participants has endured into the present. We are still having some of the arguments about the French Revolution that the revolution and its enemies were having during those events. We have never stopped arguing about 1968, though perhaps it looks less dramatic now than it did then if you were too young (or not yet born) during that moment. In other cases, the ardor and intensity of the participants has faded or moved on to some other focal point. The opposition to women’s suffrage may have endured, but it moved to some other focal point than suffrage itself. Continuing the argument against women having the franchise is one of the few remaining markers of extremism that have not been revived by the far right in any liberal democracy.
On the other hand, looking at each of these seeming ruptures reveals that there were people profoundly affected in the end who did not see themselves as implicated in those events or as having any role in them. African sovereigns and diverse African communities didn’t see “the Scramble” as a connected series of events, for the most part: their perspective was local or at best regional. By the time a sense of Europe’s “new imperialism” was available in Africa (as well as South Asia, Southeast Asia, the Pacific) for the most part it had already happened. In a sense, the self-aware character of the incoming imperial regimes—their need to present their arrival as a coherent project rather than the result of a series of simultaneous improvisations—was what taught the new imperial subjects that they had been part of a world-historical transition, and what thus made available almost immediately the thought that another world-historical transition ought to happen (national independence, autonomy, decolonization). Europeans discovered that there was an “ism” in what was happening in Italy, Germany, Spain, Portugal, Albania, etc. (and possibly happening within countries that did not end up formally fascist) only unevenly and contradictorily, much as the fascists themselves did, and not everyone who perceived or envisioned the “ism” agreed that it existed or that it was descriptively valid.
So that’s important too, and much harder in many cases: to look at people in the middle of perceived transitions who were skeptical about whether there was a transition, who had a completely different perception than the common or orthodox ones we’re used to, about what was happening.
Thought #3: Were people in the middle of these transitions right about the consequences of what was happening, and did their awareness of possible, probable or likely consequences play a role in shifting their actions in ways that ended up being unproductive, counterproductive, or unexpected?
The simple answer, in my view, is that yes, people talked incessantly in each case about what would happen after the transition, and they were almost always wrong, frequently profoundly so, often because they were trying to mobilize support or opposition through narrating the positive or negative outcomes of this rupture.
So, for example, the beneficiaries of the “Scramble for Africa”—ambitious metropolitan figures who were engaged in exploration, in advancing their military careers, in promoting themselves and their faux-journalism, in seeking to have a personal colony, in trying to advance their commercial fortunes, in claiming to be saving Africans by converting them to Christianity and so on, all made vainglorious and self-interested predictions about what would happen as the result of the violence and chaos of the conquest. Some of them continued that self-promotion into the establishment of imperial administrations—Frederick Lugard went from hanging around East Africa looking for a chance to establish himself as an imperial adventurer for the sake of social mobility to pompously claiming to be the shaper of British imperial administrative processes in sub-Saharan Africa.
Was it a major transition of the world order? Yes, and we still live with its consequences. Was it the kind of transition that its promoters claimed? Not even remotely, and it ended after a very short time. The enduring consequences of this specific moment of transition are often not at all what the people involved envisioned. Even when they’re something as simple as “conversion to Christianity”, the Christianity that is today a major part of the life of sub-Saharan African societies is largely not the conventional congregational Christianity that most European missionaries saw as a positive outcome of the Scramble.
On the other hand, the people who fought hard against conquest understood one consequence correctly, which is that their own autonomy, dignity and power as rulers or as communities would come to an end, regardless of whether the incoming wave of imperial rulers were pre-emptively violent or condescendingly accommodating.
Of these thoughts, it’s #3 that I find the most usefully soothing or complicating in facing the dark news of this week, this month, this year, this century so far. That in our moment, facing what seems likely a catastrophic series of losses of what we have achieved in the modern world, there may be unexpected contingencies, things we can’t see. #1 and #2 might help us to find them, and help us to shift what we are doing, might plan to do, might imagine could be done, to some transformation that is possible in this moment that at this very second is hard t o see.
A silver thread, rather than a lining, I fear.