Yesterday I dealt briefly with the long- vs. short-run looking forward. Today I want to deal with the long- vs. short-run looking back.
We are always in a zone of imperfect visability so far as the history just over our shoulder is concerned. It is as if we were in the hollow of the historical wave; not until we reach the crest of the next one can we look back and estimate properly what went before.
That’s from the forward to Arthur Schlesinger’s Crisis of the Old Order – part of his multi-volume biography of Franklin Roosevelt — covering most of the Great Depression and the decade leading up to it. One of the reasons I look at history is that we can actually make sense of it, whereas our own time will take decades for historians to understand and explain.
History isn’t an escape from the present, it’s an attempt to find concrete reference points with which to understand the apparent chaos we’re living in — either or by finding events that caused/conditioned our current situation by finding times in which people dealt with circumstances like our own.
Read, for example, The Education of Henry Adams (one of my very favourite books). The late 19th Century makes a lot of sense to us now (for those of us who bother to look) but in that book we can appreciate what those circumstances looked like from the inside.
The book reaches back virtually to the eighteenth century:
The flint-and-steel with which his grandfather [John Quincy] Adams used to light his own fires in the early morning was still on the mantel-piece of his study. The idea of a livery or even a dress for servants, or of an evening toilette, was next to blasphemy. Bath-rooms, water-supplies, lighting, heating, and the whole array of domestic comforts, were unknown at Quincy.
… and stretches virtually to where we are today:
Prosperity never before imagined, power never yet wielded by man, speed never reached by anything but a meteor, had made the world irritable, nervous, querulous, unreasonable and afraid….
That was 1904. Though very different in terms of specifics, the period from roughly 1890 – 1914 is a lot like our age in terms of the speed and depth of change, the role of commercial enterprise, technological advancements, and peace (and the belief that all that would go on forever).
Much of the art and music from that time is still astonishingly ‘new’ to people today. Even futurism is almost a century old:
It is, perhaps, some sort of balm for their wounds, the admirable past, at a moment when the future is denied them. But we will have none of it, we, the young, strong and living Futurists! [Futurist Manifesto, 1909]
We like to think of our age as one of “unprecedented growth” in technology, knowledge, and wealth, but consider that someone my age (30) a century ago would have witnessed the emergence of the automobile, the airplane, the movies, wireless communications, the phonograph, the skyscraper, the subway, the use of telephones– not to mention electricity in the home, office and factory, along with all the many appliances that suddenly made possible.
Until fairly recently (in terms of decades) most research and development has been a matter of “multiplying and refining” what was invented around the turn of the century (paraphrasing Jacques Barzun). It’s worth pointing out that ‘research and development’ is itself an 1890′s invention. Other things taken for granted in our business-driven society – the assembly line, scientific management, training, advertising as a discipline, chain retail – emerged around the same time.
And consider the 1907 financial crisis in which J.P. Morgan took the initiative in rescuing the U.S financial system — much like the Treasury and Federal Reserve have done now. In fact, the Federal Reserve was founded in 1913, largely in response to that crisis as a measure to avoid or address possible crises in the future.
With finance it’s especially difficult to think in terms of years and decades — it’s hard enough thinking in terms of months — even more so in this crisis. It seems like a very long time ago that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were taken over by the U.S. government — and that was just in September!
But it takes a long time for things to play out. Authorities are just beginning to work out the regulatory tangles in the way of actually implementing the rescue programs. That’ll take months, and work will continue in various (and yet-unknown) forms in the years ahead.
I used to be someone who believed that “things move faster now.” Now I think that’s false. If everything happens so lightening-quick, why has it taken over a year to get to this point from the initial scare of August 2007 (which itself was a slow response to the decline of housing prices that began at least in February)? And we’re talking about taking over a year just to recognize the problems.
Things seem to move fast because we’re so close to the action. We see all the details — we see the Paulson plan turn into the Paulson/Dodd/Frank plan, and then it continues to evolve with Gordon Brown’s plan and on-and-on into who-knows-what in the week ahead. (And just wait until the next president finally takes office.)
We see all the specifics that make 2008 so different from 1908 but we don’t see the general shapes and tones that make it similar – and in some ways, part of the same historic period. A hundred years from now all of the talking and writing about these events will covered in a single lecture.
Eventually all this will be remembered by students as a single, simplified phrase – just as we tend to simplify ’the Gilded Age’ and ‘the Great Depression’ into singular themes. Simplification isn’t always bad. It helps us organize and manage large amounts of information. If we had to go into the details of the Great Depression or the Gilded Age every time you talked about them, we’d never get anywhere.
I’m not just talking about taking lessons from the past, I’m talking about taking lessons from the discipline of history.
Good historians select particular facts and highlight specific themes, bringing them into the foreground of the narrative to make it more meaningful and effective. That skips over a lot of details — many of them important in some ways — but it makes things easier to understand and act on. Having a sense of the general themes makes the details more manageable.
It’ll be a long time before 2008 will be so easy to understand. It’s more practical to have a sense of the history we can understand. That’s the only way we can begin to develop a vague sense of the major themes in our current narrative, which is the only way to make the details of this mess manageable at all.
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