Time is a flat circle
For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven
“Hard times create strong men, strong men create good times, good times create weak men, and weak men create hard times.”
G. Michael Hopf
What if some day or night a demon were to steal into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: ‘This life as you now live and have lived it you will have to live once again and innumerable times again; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unspeakably small or great in your life must return to you, all in the same succession and sequence – even this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and even this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned upside down again and again, and you with it, speck of dust!’
Frederick Nietzsche
If you do become wiser as you age – and that’s far from guaranteed – I believe that’s primarily because you increasingly come to recognise the cyclical nature of things.
You breathe in and you breathe out. It’s day. Then it’s night. Summer follows winter. A right-leaning party is in power until – unless you live in a de jure or de facto (shout-out to my Singaporean readers!) one-party state – a left-leaning one is.
There are periods when it’s good to be a worker and there are ones when it’s good to be a boss. There are times when wealth and political power become ridiculously concentrated. And there are times (usually following a revolution, war or pandemic) when a goodly proportion of the population can, with the right combination of talent, effort and luck, get ahead in life.
Civilisations rise. Civilisations fall.
The Big Bang happens and the universe starts expanding until, many billions of years later, it succumbs to a heat death.
If you subscribe to Nietzsche’s theory of Eternal recurrence (aka Eternal return), you believe the infinitude of time means events – including your birth, life and death – will be endlessly replayed on a loop. Likewise, many (though certainly not all) Buddhists, Hindus, Sikhs and Jains, as well as some Jewish mystics, Taoists, Gnostics and Pagans, believe they will be reincarnated.
Middle-aged resignation
The upside and downside of recognising that, as one of my favourite Zen sayings goes, “all things pass quickly away” is that you just don’t get as worked up about things as you once did.
Younger partisans will often declare they are “moving to another country” if their side of politics doesn’t win an upcoming election. I’m sure it occasionally happens, but I suspect that few people over 50 make this performative declaration. That’s partly because they’ve accrued enough hard-won self-knowledge to realise they will never follow through with such a threat (and that nobody would much care if they did). But it is also because they recognise that while life under a left-wing or right-wing government may be less than ideal, it’s unlikely to be intolerable.
After all, in well-functioning democracies, those on the wrong side of 50 will have lived under a range of left-wing and right-wing governments. Even still, they’ve probably never been sent to a gulag, nor had family members hurled from helicopters.
In fact, voters of a certain age may have concluded that it’s the reigning ideology that’s important, not what party (or parties) have control of the treasury benches at any given time. As many people, including me, have noted, left-wing parties have been perfectly willing to implement neoliberal policies over the last four decades. Just as right-wing parties were happy to implement Keynesian ones for the three decades following WWII.
Thinking cyclically
I’ve been thinking about political cycles since dissecting Tom Fairless’s Wall Street Journal article about the backlash against mass immigration. For those of you who missed last week’s Musing, Fairless noted the rise of anti-immigration sentiment in Australia, Austria, Canada, Finland, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Sweden and the US and predicted that politicians would respond to voter concerns in the short term but then inevitably push immigration levels sky-high once more.
Why?
You guessed it – the cyclical nature of things. Or as Fairless put it:
The backlashes repeat a long cycle in immigration policy, experts say. Businesses constantly lobby for more-liberal immigration laws because that reduces their labor costs and boosts profits. They draw support from pro-business politicians on the right and pro-integration leaders on the left, leading to immigration policies that are more liberal than the average voter wants. That leads to a populist buildup and outburst, Manning said. Populist politicians subsequently stifle immigration, reducing voters’ anxieties, and the cycle begins again.
I’ve thought about mass immigration a lot, but I’d never considered it might be a cyclical phenomenon. In my defence, that’s because I can’t recall a time when there was a (politically potent) “populist buildup and outburst” in Australia that led to significant cuts to immigration numbers and hence widespread insouciance among the citizenry.
Nonetheless, it now strikes me that many political issues cycle through stages. For example, voters get sick of crime and disorder, so political entrepreneurs – usually but not exclusively on the Right – promise to take a hard line with criminals, the homeless and maybe also political protestors.
These “tough on crime” policies work and everybody starts enjoying the benefits of living in low-crime, orderly societies. But after a while, people become concerned that those in prison are disproportionately (a) from low-income, troubled backgrounds and/or (b) members of certain racial minorities. Progressives, and sometimes even conservatives, grow concerned about (a) the sheer number of people serving harsh sentences and (b) the fact that so many of them are from vulnerable groups.
Decarceration advocates start making the case that tough-on-crime policies are costly, unnecessary and possibly even counterproductive. These advocates find an increasingly receptive audience among younger voters who’ve never been mugged or witnessed a homeless person publicly defecating, as well as (some) older voters who’ve long since forgotten how unpleasant those things can be. Soon enough, ‘tough on crime’ policies are replaced with ‘soft on crime’ ones, and the cycle starts again.
(As an aside, I’ve always thought it a bitter irony that John Lennon, like many bohemian artists before and after him, advocated criminal justice reform. His killer hadn’t previously committed any crimes, so it's unlikely Lennon would still be alive if Rudy Giuliani had been elected Mayor of New York City 20 years earlier. But if you allow crime and social disorder to flourish, especially in a society awash with guns, you shouldn’t act surprised when the end results aren’t pretty.)
What happens when the cycle of political life jams?
As luck would have it, this is my 75th Precariat musings newsletter. (Apart from a brief Christmas holiday, I’ve been churning them out on a weekly basis since January, 2022.) If I were pretentious enough to refer to my Substack oeuvre (spoiler alert – I definitely am), I would argue that its metanarrative (sorry, not sorry – I warned you I was prepared to engage in Gallic pomposity) is that we’re in an interregnum where the standard political cycles have stopped unfolding.
Americans don’t want to keep locking up millions of poor people, many of them African-American or Hispanic. But they also don’t like the results when the authorities stop locking up millions of their fellow citizens.
Few people – with the possible exception of the migrants in question – are happy with unsustainably high levels of immigration. But economies and – given cratering fertility rates – even entire societies now seem reliant on ever-greater numbers of immigrants showing up.
Neoliberalism is exhausted, much as Keynesianism was by the mid-1970s, but we haven’t moved on from neoliberalism, despite the events of 2016.
Wealth and political power have become concentrated – to the point that even some plutocrats are starting to fear the socially destabilising effects of Gilded Era levels of inequality – but there’s yet to be a serious effort to reverse that trend.
Do I have any answers about how Western societies can ‘unjam’ themselves and move on to their next phase of evolution?
No, I don’t.
But maybe something will occur to me while I’m writing the next 75 Precariat Musings.
I'm too sick (post-travel Covid) to fully appreciate everything you've written here but I definitely agree with you about the cyclical nature of life and politics.