Column 05/23/22: The End of the Armistice

[A new concept: after years of reading G.K. Chesterton's newspaper columns, I have really come to like the format. There is something interesting about seeing an essayist with a broad variety of interests comment in real time on things as they come up, whether general events or politics or religion or literature or life. This is not true of most modern newspaper columns, which are short and narrowly focused on partisan politics. With this in mind, I have set myself the task of writing a weekly "column" in which I comment on whatever the hell I want, with very little editing, and while limiting myself in length (c. 2000-3000 words) and complexity. I make no claims whatsoever that these "essays" will be even a hundredth as interesting as Chesterton's.]

The End of the Armistice

Prices are high, cost of living through the roof, inflation peaking, workers desperate for steady employment and higher wages, businesses desperate for labor, productivity down, resignations endemic, corporate profits through the roof, traditional sectors of the economy being hollowed out and replaced by new, creative forms of gambling and get-rich-quick schemes, reports of new, localized but increasingly apocalyptic conflicts appear daily on the news, there are rumblings of labor strikes and even revolution, and many people seem to find it impossible to do the most basic things.

What year is it? 1920.

At the beginning of the event known colloquially as "the Pandemic" (much as people in 1920 spoke colloquially of "the War"), I made a few observations and predictions which I have had no cause to retract:

1) That the Pandemic was the most significant global event since the World Wars, precisely because it was an event affected almost everyone, in every stratum of society throughout the world, immediately and extremely.

2) That in predicting how society and individuals would respond and react to the Pandemic, we should look to the World Wars.

3) That therefore the period after the Pandemic, like the periods after both Wars, would be marked by significant societal and political and international instability.

4) In particular, I believed that the immediate impact of Pandemic conditions would lead to an increase in stress and stress-related behaviors, a sense of personal and global instability a la "anything can happen," and therefore to simultaneous and staggered increases in both extreme risk-averse behavior and extreme risk-prone behavior. That is, faced with the knowledge that Events with extreme personal and global effects can happen apart from normal, societally- and intellectually-approved calculations and systems, people would spend a significant period of time oscillating between an irrational desire to flee from all dangers, and an equally irrational desire to risk anything and everything since they're probably doomed anyway. And the result of both of these impulses would be social and political instability.

My initial belief was that in the case of the World Wars this instability had taken a while, years or even decades, to manifest itself, but that in the case of the Pandemic, due to the presence of the Internet and more extreme forms of mass media, this process would be accelerated, and we would start to see significant instability very quickly. My initial statement in 2020 was thus that the next ten years or so of extreme global and domestic events should be ascribed to the influence of the Pandemic.

The immediate predictive results of this theory have been, so far, quite good. In particular, the mass protests and rioting of 2020, the extreme anti-vaccer and doomer movements, the Stop the Steal movement and the twinned insanity of people overreacting to the "insurrection" of January 6th, the Great Resignation, the Ukrainian War, and many other individual events I could mention all fit comfortably within the boundaries of the sort of thing I would expect to happen in the period after the Pandemic. From terror of being magnetized by 5G shots to Putin's willingness to risk his nation's whole military and economic future in a single attempt to conquer Ukraine or die trying, people continue to behave in ways that assume that all bets off and there's no tomorrow.

However, over the past years, I've modified this a bit given both the actual events to ensure, and given the significant reading I've been doing on the actual period of the World Wars.

In particular, I have recently been reading, for fun and interest, the back-issues of The New Witness, a weekly newspaper founded by G.K. Chesterton's brother, Cecil, and their friend Hilaire Belloc, and eventually nominally taken over by Chesterton himself as a painful duty after his brother had died and Belloc abandoned the paper in protest at the overt anti-Semitism of some of its contributors.*

(*this is a small, parenthetical note on a big topic, but Belloc is often slandered as an incorrigible anti-Semite, and his allegedly extreme anti-Semitism used as an excuse for Chesterton's allegedly milder variant. As a matter of fact, Belloc was by any possible standard far less anti-Semitic than Chesterton--not that I regard Chesterton as an anti-Semite in the conventional modern sense. This a totally different topic, however; and this parenthesis will self-destruct in three words).

While I initially started reading The New Witness to get a better sense of Chesterton, the paper mostly has little or nothing to do with him. Though Chesterton took over nominal editorship after the death of his brother in WW1, he did not function as editor. For the most part, Chesterton's contributions amounted to a single weekly column, the power of his name on the front page, and the extensive sums of money he injected to keep the paper afloat. Indeed, during much of the period I have been reading, even his column is absent (thanks to the trip to the Holy Land immortalized in the excellent The New Jerusalem, one of his more underrated books). While Chesterton may occasionally have written the (anonymous) leader, I have as yet detected his distinctive "voice" in this part of the paper only once or twice. Due to this odd trusteeship, The New Witness is by any standards an extremely badly-edited paper, featuring an odd mix of political and literary contributions from a dizzying range of opinion, with articles and contributors frequently contradicting both each other and the paper's editorial stance.

Precisely the features that would have made it a poor newspaper for a contemporary reader, however, make it very interesting for a historian. It is, in fact, rather an ideal window into the time immediately after WW1, 1919-1921--a period that is, I firmly believe, instructively parallel to our own.

Before reading more on the period, I had assumed, based on the vague history I was taught, that both World Wars had in fact been followed by a period of renewed hope and optimism (the Baby Boom/the Roaring 20s) before giving way to doubt and instability later. I now see this scenario as absolute nonsense.

In fact, both wars were followed by immediate social and intellectual and moral instability, which oscillated between different poles and faded over time generationally but continued to have effects into the present day. In the case of WW1, the columns of The New Witness were filled in the months and years after the war with dire reports. Many of these, as stated above, eerily parallel current news. There were, then as now, numerous campaigns of war, massacre, ethnic cleansing driven by people and movements eager to "risk it all" and seize the opportunities presented by general political instability. There was, then as now, a rising economic conflict between a corporate world buoyed by "War profits" (Pandemic profits) and a working class still trying to subsist on "pre-War wages" (similiter) in the face of drastic rises in the price of food, fuel, and other necessities caused by inflation, by supply-chain breakdowns, and by deliberate profiteering. There was then, as now, a sudden and insane "boom" in the stock market and all other forms of organized gambling caused fundamentally by a new and pervasive willingness to risk everything for short term profits over and above any kind of long-term investment. There was then, as now, a desire on the part of both government and corporate elites to extend the "disciplining" and organizational features developed to prosecute the War (beat the Pandemic) towards a general disciplining and organizing of society at large and non-elites in particular. There was, then, as now, a dire productivity problem caused both by the above dynamic and by a mass psychological unwillingness in workers to labor as productively under conditions and for compensation that they previously had or would have tolerated. 

Reading about the World Wars has very much illuminated contemporary problems, at least for me. To note only two typical instances, I found it interesting to note the journal's financial commentator (operating, amusingly, in rather extreme independence from the journal's general anti-capitalist editorial line) again and again arguing that a massive and insane boom was taking place in financial speculation, that companies were issuing shares and capital out of all proportion to their actual feasibility, and that people and institutions large and small were simply gambling, without regard for long-term results, and directly because of the extreme psychological states produced by the War, which had put everyone into a psychologically extreme state defined by fear of the future and and avoidance of any form of steady, disciplined effort. Said commentator thus repeatedly predicted an eventual total collapse of the post-war market nearly ten years before "Black Monday" and the Great Depression. In AD 2022, meanwhile, we can see all around us a truly insane growth, since the Pandemic, of any and every form of organized gambling, including not only "traditional" financial speculation, but cryptocurrency, NFTs, pyramid schemes, and sports gambling. 

As for the labor and productivity crisis and the Great Resignation of 2022, it would be difficult to improve upon the basic summation given by a contributor to The New Witness in 1920; that after years of extreme, disciplined effort and hardship undergone idealistically and selflessly for a great national cause, people across the world were now simply worn out and suffering from a fundamental, understandable unwillingness to suffer any more such extreme discipline, effort, or hardship for the dubious causes of professional success and corporate profit. Then, as now, it is hard to blame them.

This fundamental psychological dynamic of Effort/Discipline/Hardship -> Relaxation/License/Escape is responsible, in my view, not only for much that we see now (and much that they saw then), but also for the fundamental historical dynamics of the 20th century. One very simple (but I think, extremely incisive) way to think about the history of the 20th century is as two World Wars accompanied by two global cycles of this sort, playing themselves out at every level of political and social and ethical and cultural and religious life. 

And now--so blessed are we--the End of History has ended with a third such Event providing an analogous cycle for our time and place and society. 

As the result of this, I have revised the predictions and analysis above slightly. I no longer believe that what we are seeing reflects an accelerated social or psychological timeline viz a vis the World Wars (though I continue to believe that the Internet is shaping the response). Instead, we are mostly seeing the psychological, social, and political effects of such an Event play themselves out, simultaneously and in cyclical fashion both, in the same way such events have played themselves out before. People shaped by such events naturally oscillate between extremely risk-prone and risk-averse behavior. They value stability and safety above other goods; they are more willing to take extreme risks and do extreme things to achieve minimal goals; they find it more difficult to muster up disciplined, consistent effort for anything; they are unwilling to tolerate hardships they previously would have tolerated; they are willing to risk evils that previously would have prevented them from acting; they are more likely to be aggressive and unkind; they are more likely to be checked out and conflict-averse; they lack the faith to engage in long-term planning; they engage in magical thinking and contemplate sudden and final settlements to everything; et cetera. This may seem wildly inconsistent individually, but taken as a whole constitutes a perfectly consistent landscape.

All of this may sound quite negative or even hopeless, but I don't believe it is any such thing. I am not a historicist in any extreme sense; the world and individuals can decide to do, generally speaking, whatever they want. The psychological, social, and political pressures spoken of above have contain both positive and negative potentialities, and how they play themselves out depends on decision-making on both a personal and societal level. Nevertheless, in deciding how to react to a given historical situation, people are aided a great deal by knowing what is going on, in themselves and in the world.

A long period of relative stability, like the period of the Fin de Siecle before World War One, or the period of the End of History before the Pandemic, has its immense dangers: bad systems are retained, evils tolerated, irrational goals pursued, with a total prodigality of effort and energy and planning and a total lack of consideration of alternatives and risks. An Event makes effort and energy more expensive, and reminds us that the alternatives, risks, and possibilities are many. It thus provides immense opportunities for rebalancing and reform.

All of the above are simply and solely historical conditions; that is, they are things that can be helpful to take into account in calculating how difficult our goals will be to achieve, both personally and collectively, and therefore how much energy and effort we must allocate in order to so, how, and where. They do not, cannot, must not, be allowed to change our goals themselves. If a thing was good before the Pandemic, it is good after it; if it was worth some amount of risk, energy, time, upheaval, conflict, disciplined effort, and so forth before the Pandemic, it is worth some amount of these things after it; and if it not then, not now. The trick is to remember this, even in the face of the world.

May our Armistice have a happier end than theirs.