Ever since 1/6 I’ve been thinking about the events of that day. A week ago I posted an essay to 3 Quarks Daily about them: Tectonic Tremors, Ghost Dancing, and the Certification Riots.
I’m still thinking.
A comparison between our current socio-political situation and that at the time of the Civil War has been on my mind for a year or so. The comparison is a difficult one to make because our current situation is so very different along various dimensions (e.g. political geography, military forces, media & communications). While it’s easy to assert that the comparison doesn’t work, I’m reluctant to do so. But I’m equally reluctant to deny the comparison. Moreover, one can argue that we’re still living with reverberations from the Civil War. I just don’t know.
That’s one thing.
The fact of reverberations bring up the matter of time scale. Consider plate tectonics. Earthquakes happen on a scale of minutes, hours, and days. But that’s the culmination of movements on the scale of decades and centuries. Continental drift happened on the scale of tens and hundreds of millions of years.
What time scales are relevant to 1/6? The events of the day took place on scales of minutes and hours. But one can easily link those minutes and hours to the whole of the Trump presidency, a scale of years. And we can link that presidency to events going back though 9/11 though Clintonomics to Reagan trickle-down to the Civil Rights movement....to the Civil War....to the origins of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Though we’ve got to be careful with this.
That’s another thing.
Now we’ve got to look forward. It’s not as though the historical forces manifest in 1/6 were fully manifest or “absorbed” in those events. Those forces are still at work. And how they’ll work out over the next decade, say, is not written in stone. Not at all. What will happen will certainly be influenced by how large numbers of actors (attempt to) make sense of what has happened. That means that it is, IN PRINCIPLE, impossible to limn the future by investigating the past.
So, back to the Civil War. It changed the country. Is the country undergoing a change of similar magnitude? I don’t think we know. What changes would be of comparable magnitude?
More later.