[R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] History and Hope

[Bill Totten]

by John Michael Greer

The Archdruid Report (November 05 2008)

Druid perspectives on nature, culture, and the future of industrial society


I'd meant to talk in this week's Archdruid Report post about the peak
oil conference I attended last weekend in suburban Detroit. Still, that
will have to wait for next time, as last night's election results
deserve a comment of their own.

Mind you, I intend to leave the political implications for others to
discuss. The separation of church and state has been denounced by far
too many people, on the left as well as the right, who have forgotten
that it was originally put there to protect churches from political
interference, not vice versa. It is nonetheless one of the essential
foundations of the religious liberty that enables me to practice my
Druid faith; one of the lessons I draw from this is that, as the head of
a religious organization, I have the civic duty to keep my mouth shut
about matters of partisan politics. There will no doubt be a banquet of
political discussion in the months ahead of us lavish enough to satisfy
even the most eager palate.

What I want to discuss just now, though, has less to do with the
candidates in the presidential election now ended, than with the
millions of ordinary people who filed into polling places yesterday and
decided between them. All through the last two years or so, since Barack
Obama began what seemed at the time like an improbable quest for the US
presidency, one concern expressed repeatedly by the media and ordinary
people alike was the possibility that the election would end up being
about the issue of race. In a certain sense, that was indeed what
happened - but in a very unexpected sense.

Some four decades after the assassination of Martin Luther King, the
American people had the chance to judge an African-American candidate,
in King's words, not by the color of his skin but by the content of his
character - and by and large, they rose to that not inconsiderable
challenge. There may well have been some who voted for Obama because of
his ethnic background, just as there were doubtless some who voted
against him for that reason; but even among those who voted for his
opponent, there were many who did so not because of Obama's race, but
simply because they disagreed with his policy proposals, just as if he
were any other candidate.

That is an achievement of immense scope. It may just turn out that this
nation has at long last begun to heal the old wound of racial hatred
that has riven America right down to its core since the first days of
European settlement. So deep a wound will not close at once; as Wendell
Berry pointed out some years ago in a book too rarely read, the scar
tissue of the racial divide reaches all through our national psyche, on
all sides of the various color lines that still wall us away from each
other - and from ourselves. Still, it's no little thing that a majority
of voters in Virginia, the heart of the old Confederacy; in Indiana,
where a quarter of all adult males belonged to the Ku Klux Klan a mere
seventy years ago; and in this nation as a whole, voted for the first
time in history to send a black man to the White House.

We have no way of knowing in advance what kind of president Barack Obama
will turn out to be, or how history will regard his tenure. He's proven
himself in a difficult campaign to be resourceful, energetic,
thoughtful, and almost superhumanly cool under pressure, but many people
have arrived at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue with abilities like these, and
some of them have crashed and burned. Many of the cards in the hand
he'll have to play will be dealt him by decisions made months and years
beforehand, or by circumstances nobody can control.

Still, a door has been opened, and I can't help but think that America
will be better off from the simple fact that the highest levels of its
political system are no longer exclusively reserved to the fraction of
its population that happens to be white. Nor is yesterday's impact
limited to issues of race; I think it almost certain that America's
first woman president will be inaugurated within a decade, and it's even
odds which of the two major parties will nominate her.

The broadening of the pool of potential talent this implies will be
desperately needed in the years to come. It's unfortunate, though it was
probably inevitable, that the major issues of this moment in history
were barely mentioned by any party, major or minor, in the presidential
campaign. Over the next decade or so, the United States will have to
work out a way to stand down from a global military-economic empire it
can no longer afford to maintain; it will have to find the money and the
means to replace a mostly fictive economy based on the manipulation of
baroque financial instruments with a real economy based on the
production of goods and services for people; it will have to make good
on decades of malign neglect inflicted on the national infrastructure on
nearly every level, even as it struggles to convert a suburban landcape
viable only in an age of cheap abundant fossil fuels to something that
makes sense in the world of scarce and expensive energy ahead of us.

Few of the changes that will be imposed by these necessities will be
popular. Many, in fact, will be bitterly resented, and none of them will
come cheaply. We have wasted so many opportunities and poured so many of
our once-abundant resources into a decades-long joyride that the next
few years will almost certainly impose one wrenching challenge after
another on a society that the recent past has left very poorly equipped
to face them. Our history is among the heaviest burdens we face, because
the habits we learned during America's imperial zenith are among the
things that are most necessary to unlearn in the new and far more
multipolar world dawning around us.

Still, I find myself feeling a bit more hopeful than before, for the
burden of racial hatred was also profoundly rooted in American history
and identity, and the verdict of last night's election suggests that it
has turned out to be subject to change. I think of the difference forty
years has made, from 1968, when an assassin's bullet cut down Martin
Luther King and inner cities across America exploded in violence, to
2008, when a nation's ballot sent Barack Obama to the presidency and
many of those same inner cities celebrated straight through the night.
We live in a different country now, and the possibility that Americans
might be able to rise to the massive challenge of the deindustrial
transition has become just slightly harder for me to dismiss out of
hand. Still, that turn of history's wheel is still ahead of us, and we
will have to wait and see.
_____

John Michael Greer has been active in the alternative spirituality
movement for more than 25 years, and is the author of a dozen books,
including The Druidry Handbook (2006) and The Long Descent (2008). He
lives in Ashland, Oregon.

http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2008/11/history-and-hope.html


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