The Kingdom of South Africa, Federation Associate,
Robert Heinlein – Stranger In A Strange Land
was again cited before the High Court for persecution of its white minority.
Published in 1961, Heinlein’s future-world epic contains the above quote as part of a fictitious news broadcast. When I originally read it, before majority rule was in effect in South Africa, I considered it a plausible future scenario…after all, the white minority had been doing that very thing to the rest of the population while in power. And reading it after the (effectively) peaceful transfer of power to a democratic majority ruled state, I was glad that things had not ended up that way.
Stranger Than Fiction
But the world has become less believable than fiction now, and in the spirit of Heinlein’s title, it sometimes feels that we are indeed all strangers in it. Would we have believed a decade ago that a convicted felon, and adjudicated rapist, would have gained the US presidency on a platform of insults, discrimination, misinformation and vituperation?
Would we have believed that Israel, a state created to protect people from millennia of oppression, would itself become oppressors of such magnitude that they are facing charges of genocide, not only in the International Criminal Court, but also from the mouths of eminent Holocaust scholars, not to mention Holocaust survivors, who, I think, probably recognise it when they see it…
Would we have believed that a newly authoritarian Russia would revive its imperial ambitions and begin expanding back into eastern Europe? (Well, we might have believed that one.) That Germany and France (and concomitantly much of the rest of Europe) would be steadily sliding to the right, that violent protests against immigrants would be igniting the UK? What the hell happened?
Time Passed
That’s what happened. Time passed. The wheel turned. The pendulum swung. The first became last, and the slow became fast. That’s what happens.
I think we forget (inevitably) how far we’ve come and how quickly. The recent pace of social improvement in terms of people’s rights and freedoms and protections lulled us into thinking that this was how the future was going to be. We forget how many people fought hard and long to break the barriers whose past fall we’ve taken for granted…and then we don’t understand why the next bit of progress appears so difficult to achieve.
In my lifetime, same-sex relationships went from illegal to sanctioned by (some) churches. The franchise (in my country) went from something exercised by only the white minority to one that was universally applied, giving everybody an equal say (theoretically) into which politicians would next ruin things for everybody. A divided and half-communist Berlin was united and the wall came down. A united and fully communist USSR dissolved, freeing multiple eastern European countries to mess themselves up, instead of being messed up by a de facto empire. Fewer people went hungry, more people were educated. Progress…progressed.
Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt
But, progress means casualties, and the more “radical” that progress is to the minds of those who want to just keep the status quo, or who believe that the way things are (or were) is the way they are meant to be, the more casualties, (real and perceived) there are.
Speaking as somebody who struggles a lot with (small scale) change, I know it can be uncomfortable, frustrating, scary even. And when people feel as though the world they’re living in is not what they thought it was, how they thought it should be, or how they remember it being, they start to experience fear, uncertainty, and doubt.
But…because we’re human, our ego’s don’t deal well with those feelings. And feeling wounded, many people express them as anger, and lash out as a means of self-defence. These are the casualties of a socially evolving world, and as many have found to their glee, (and to their sorrow), the power of a legion of dispossessed can be immense.
The Pendulum Swings
“The only constant is change,” Heraclitus never said. (And honestly, we’re not even sure what Plotinus was going on about when he (appears to have) said something about things always being in flux. Because tiny fragments of text that have survived nearly 2,000 years do not usually contain much context or exposition.)
However, that certainly doesn’t change the well recognised fact that the statement is fundamentally true, even if constantly mis-attributed etc.
The pendulum swings. And really, my earlier allusion to Bob Dylan’s classic The Times They Are A-Changin’ does say it best. Except…Dylan didn’t seem to take into account that it works both ways. Once the slow are fast, and the first last, they’re destined to simply change places again at some point. And that’s what appears to be happening at the moment. (To a certain extent anyway…regardless of what happens, the rich get richer.) It’s not great timing, and the implications may be severe, but it’s perhaps not as strange or shocking as people seem to be feeling it is right now.
Indeed, one might consider that the casualties of this currently ongoing social retrograde will make up the legions of wounded and dispossessed who will drive the next swing toward the other side. It’s not much consolation to the latest round of casualties, but that’s the way it works.
In The Long Run..
In the long run, things will work out. The sun will collapse into a red giant, the universe will suffer the inevitable heat death that is the end result of entropy, (see the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics), and all of humanity will long since have ceased to exist. (And people think I’m a pessimist.)