On (or in) Progress
I was raised by parents with a cosmopolitan outlook and the self-confidence of people who were tested by wartime and its responsibilities. Spending the formative years of my early childhood traveling around the planet by ship or train — at that pace, with long sojourns in Singapore and Western Europe — left me with a sense of having lived my life in reverse, of experiencing a world that no longer exists.
When I was 11, the Soviet Union and the United States exchanged shows. Nixon famously debated Khrushchev in a mockup of an American kitchen in Moscow, while I visited the USSR’s show at the Coliseum in Manhattan. I kept the catalogue, which smelled of pine tar, for years. A few years later, as part of a program encouraged by the U.S. government, we invited a visiting professor of philosophy from Moscow at Columbia University. He came out twice to see us, both times with a minder, a woman named Ludmilla. He told me his father had been a biologist, and that he’d chosen philosophy because it was safer. When we took him and Ludmilla around, she commented at different times that they had better examples of this or that in the USSR.
The Berlin Crisis unfolded while my father and I were camping in Superior National Forest in Canada — the North Woods that my father had visited with his parents when growing up in Omaha. Turning on my transistor radio, we heard President Kennedy address the nation on the risk of brinkmanship that the situation had created. “Will the Russians bomb New York,” I asked? It was always assumed to be the number one target. “No,” my father said.
Brinkmanship continued until finally it didn’t. It’s easy to forget that period, but we were episodically convinced we were about to go to war — a form of war unlike any other. Fallout from testing drifted across North America, and we worried about that, too. Not constantly, but it was there the way the Hayward Fault — up the road from my house — is there. The Vietnam War, which Kennedy involved us in and Lyndon Johnson escalated, marked a transition back to plain-old warfare, napalm and Agent Orange substituting for nuclear winter. Most of us were opposed to it, resisted it, protested.
The marches on Washington led to Johnson’s resignation and Nixon’s ascendancy. He and Henry Kissinger weaseled out of a war we weren’t winning. Brezhnev took over in the Soviet Union. At some point, competition became mainly economic and warfare took the form of regional, even local conflicts with an overlay of deterrence, always vastly expensive. Missiles on trains was the last of it, by which time Gorbachev and Reagan were in power.
It may not matter how an era ends — what counts is what follows, how the underpinnings give way and something else emerges that’s both better and worse that what it replaced. People look back at the Austro-Hungarian Empire now with a certain admiration, because — like Yugoslavia, arguably its only real successor — it convinced a contentious array of citizens to cohere and lead productive lives rather than squander them pursuing their historic quarrels.
It may be that we oscillate between eras of concord and divisiveness. In the midst of one, some long for the other — for a concord that’s more narrowly drawn, for example, despite the strife this creates, or for an end to that strife, at whatever cost to individual sensibilities. My life traces a version of this arc, marking the end of British power, the ascendancy of America, its slow eclipse, and the emergence of other would-be hegemons, each with its claims. Politics too play out the collapse of any real or pretended consensus, inventing new tribal imperatives.
“No bourgeoisie, no democracy,” I read last night. It may be true. Just now, I read 1848 described as the “failed bourgeois revolution.” I hadn’t thought of it as such, but then Marx extolled the bourgeoisie for overthrowing the monarchy and in Central Europe they had to do it again. They value culture, individuality, private life, and commerce, I read.
The bourgeoisie, the third estate, are in trades and professions. These are hereditary more than is acknowledged, families moving between narrow bands. Individuals break out, but the genetics dog the line. I am an example. Trained as an architect like my grandfather, I became an editor and publisher like his father. We propitiate our ancestors and gravitate toward what comes naturally to us. Things follow: marriages, houses, children who fill them and depart, furniture and furnishings set off by art, a style that defines us to ourselves, working its way back in time and referencing places noted, people encountered, books and films read and seen — everything we live through.
There must be a fork in the road, or forks, that veer off into parochial, reactive byways. They fool us with a seeming familiarity, their signposts in languages we understand, but they’re perilous, we realize, as we stand there. “Progress” also appears, with bigger signs, billboards, megaphones. Crowds surge one way and another. Glares are fixed on dissenters. It’s hard to know sometimes who is who, who we are really, what are our actual views? We moved far from the capital for a reason, but now they’ve come to us, processions of them.
Progress is too often a zero sum, a parochial taking at others’ expense. It should be a greater sum — this for me is the message of the cosmos, which appeals to our enlightened interest. Especially now, when the planetary nature of our existence is all too clear, when borders are show to be illusory.
