Times Change

It's hard to take. Things, we're told, are better than ever. But I don't believe it. The weather is getting worse, retail stores are empty and jails are full. The Democrats are fighting with the Republicans – as they have since the Republican Party was organized in 1854. Abraham Lincoln was their second nominee for President (John Fremont was the first, in 1856), but hard as the battles were then (John Breckinridge, John Bell, and Stephen Douglas were the opposition in that campaign), current politics is worse than it's ever been. There has to be a way to forget the present and the disputes that the media thrusts in our faces and move into the future. But there isn't. So my solution is to focus on the past.

And what comes to me is an image of Abraham Lincoln. Not that we were contemporaries, but he was an example for us of a true and a great American – what we should all be like. So, back in the middle of the twentieth century, when heroes were heroes and villains villains, what did they teach us?

They taught us that Abe Lincoln studied his law books by candle light.

Shouldn't he have turned on the fluorescent lights? Or used the internet? Or kindled his Kindle rather than the candle wax? But if I didn't have these things as a child, certainly he never had them. Those things weren't available to him a century earlier. Electricity, although it existed and had even been discovered, hadn't been put to much use. There was no internet and there certainly weren't devices based on wireless technology. However useful those items may be to us, Abe Lincoln, or anyone of his time, wouldn't have even dreamed of them.

A few centuries earlier – before Gutenberg – there weren't easily accessible books, especially law books. Even after him it took a while for the spread of his printing press and its products. And before Prometheus stole fire from the gods, man – even the greats like Lincoln – wouldn't have even been able to light candles. But, of course, that was then. And we have since learned how to make fires and even burn books. To that degree there was “progress.”

Times change (or so “they” want us to believe). Sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse. Our lives are very different from those of our forebears. Certainly medicine has progressed since my childhood, and movies, and electronics, and a wide variety of “things.” But people are the same.

We're quick to quote Santayana. We admonish those who follow us not to ignore history for fear that they will repeat it. But by emphasizing the remembrance of things past we forget the future. What our parents liked, what worked for them, is not necessarily what we need if there is to be progress. We may be cautioned not to waste our time reinventing the wheel, but sometimes a wheel is not what we need. Perhaps the reason we cannot solve our problems is that our “solutions” are little more than rearrangements of those problems and of past solutions. Too often we fiddle with the wheel when we need an entirely new approach.

Unfortunately, all our changes are superficial. Song styles may differ, language may change and prices may rise (when I had my first car the goal was to find a filling station at which I could get gasoline for 16.9 cents a gallon), but we accept these as evidence of progress without any real alteration in the causes of our difficulties. A computer only increases our ability to recognize those problems more quickly, it does not change human nature. We're as involved with ourselves and our own ways as we've always been. History doesn't repeat itself, it simply persists. Repetition would suggest that are points of progress from which we return to the past – that where we are is different from where we once were. And, unfortunately, there's nothing new under the fluorescents.

So, it grieves me to say, however much we may need it, real change is improbable. We might as well accept that. The technology will improve, but no matter how we tweak the world around us nothing will really be different. Our science and electronics will make quantum leaps and we'll live longer allowing us to take advantage of them, but we and our children will never understand each other. Things past will continue to be irrelevant. I may be entitled to pass on my wisdom, however no one is obliged to listen. So however much I may yearn for change, I know that it's unlikely to come.

Politicians, being human (more or less), will continue to fight. Like the rest of us, they've learned nothing. And our children will repeat our mistakes. Even though there may be new twists, there will be old attitudes and old vanity. Our words won't change anything. Abraham Lincoln said: “As our case is new, we must think and act anew.” But we won't. Maybe I hope for too much. Perhaps the generations, notwithstanding our attempts to engage our offspring, weren't meant to communicate. Nothing in the future is likely to be fundamentally different. But who cares? That won't be my problem.

January 26, 2017