Permanence, Change, Mortality

As Your Humble Blogger is a fan of Tom Stoppard’s plays, I greatly enjoyed reading Revolution in the Head, by Neal Ascherson, a feature in the Guardian about the new play. The play is set in Czechoslovakia, and Mr. Ascherson talks not only about Mr. Stoppard, but about Milan Kundera and Vaclav Havel and differing ideas about the idea of Czech-ness, if you will. At one point, Mr. Ascheron muses

And yet, perhaps, there are two sorts of national culture in Europe. There are those who can imagine their own extinction - a region once called the Czech lands where 100 years ago people spoke and wrote a language which can now only be understood with a dictionary. That was Kundera's nightmare, which also haunted the great Gaelic poet Sorley MacLean. And then there are others - France, Britain, Poland, for instance - for whom the idea that the French, English or Polish languages are mortal is too absurd to be imaginable.

I don’t know if I agree with the division, as such. Generally, I think there are two kinds of people in the world: those who seek to divide the world into two kinds of people, those who do not, and those who have difficulty with arithmetic. I place myself in the latter camp. But the basic idea is, I think, an important one, and one that is worth musing over as we head up to the two hundred and thirtieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. Because Americans, at least of the last generation or three, seem to me to have great difficulty imagining that America is mortal. America the nation, the constitution, the idea, the ideal, the practice.

I’m not, of course, saying that we are in imminent danger of invasion and occupation. Nor am I (this time) talking about the creeping fascism that is clearly the most dangerous short-term threat to Our Way of Life. I’m mostly talking about a mindset that attributes permanence to, well, lots of things, but particularly the US of A.

I don’t think, by the way, that this is an exclusively Conservative matter, either. True, Conservatives should, by inclination, be thinking in terms of a permanent status quo, at least as an ideal or a dream. Progressives, presumably, keep in mind that Things Change, and have as an ideal a constantly adapting, improving nation. Still, I think that Progressives tend to think of that change within the framework of, well, the Constitution. Not just short-term, either. Yes, there are some revolutionaries (older ones, as far as I have come in contact with them) that argue for short-term revisionist policy change while keeping their eyes on the World-Government prize (or the anarcho-syndicalist small independent commune prize, or the international worker’s soviet prize, or the uploaded consciousness in orbit prize), but as a cultural matter, we are operating from a nicely complacent assumption that the US of A will continue Yooessing forever and ever, amen.

Of course, Gentle Readers of this Tohu Bohu are, in the main, readers of speculative fiction (including writers and editors thereof), who are perhaps more likely than most to avoid this worldview, belonging simultaneously to this American culture of which I speak and to the specfic subculture which relishes open-ended futurism and which has taken the Singularity as somewhat of a touchstone. Not that I think that the subculture is superior (vaddevah dat means) to the American culture of which I speak, which is of course far more complex than my allusion to it here. But the response to the survey framed something like The American method of selecting legislators, judges and presidents will be very similar in fifty years to the way it is now, and the way it has been for a hundred and fifty years would lean more towards the strongly disagree among readers of sf than among the populace at large, and much more towards the disagree.

Which leads to the question: who cares? Or, to be kind, is it a good thing or a bad thing to assume that your nation is to all intents permanent? Well, one might think that the aura of permanence would lead a people to long-term planning (a good think, in the opinion of Your Humble Blogger). But I don’t think it does. Perhaps a people who assume their survival don’t find it necessary to plan for it. Or perhaps cultural paranoia is a generator of ideas.

Or, of course, perhaps I’ve got hold of the wrong end of the stick altogether. I may just be romanticizing the Irish, the Czechs, and the Jews, who have survived without that survival being attributable to anything like long-term planning. And I may (out of touch with popular culture as I am) have totally misread the zeitgeist and how millenarian angst outweighs the complacency I perceive. Still, that’s how it looks to me.