The Reality Of Endless Struggle—An Analysis (24 February 2023) by Lawrence Davidson
Part I—Endless Problems
Have you noticed that fighting the good fight: the fight for justice, common sense compromise, the reduction (if not the outright elimination) of poverty, maldistribution of resources, prejudice, crime in general, and other human failings, is never ending. You do get a victory now and then, but rarely anything definitive or permanent. War, persecution of minorities, abuse of women, various forms of modern economic exploitation, all persist no matter what local reforms, international laws, treaties, and public outcries take place.
Part II—War
Take for instance the problem of war. Will it, and localized “proxy wars” that are often mistaken for periods of relative “peace,” ever disappear? Or will these episodes of massive violence simply always be with us? The LA Progressive considered this problem in its U.S. guise.
“It has been a year of unprecedented war hysteria – remarkable in a country [U.S.] that has been gripped in continuous war hysteria for generations.” So much for the shock value of unprecedented slaughter and the use of nuclear weapons experienced in World War II. The international laws and organizations that followed were designed to curb such behavior. Yet, almost immediately, smaller conflicts like those in Korea followed. The process of decolonization was fraught with violence. And, in the halls of power, there was no joy, but indeed fear, over what the LA Progressive refers to as “a mass revulsion to war and war propaganda.” As far as the United States government was concerned, a peaceful and compromising popular attitude was a malady. After the debacle in southeast Asia and the fall of Saigon, it was referred to as the Vietnam Syndrome.
Part III—Racism
How about the curse of systemic racism? According to Ibram X. Kendi, the 2016 National Book Award winner and founder of the Boston University Center for Antiracist Research, the world is suffering from “metastatic cancer stage 4.” Cancer is his metaphor for “racism and the racist policies … that have spread to almost every part of the body politic.”
Anyone who knows some accurate history will agree that systemic racism, expressing itself in one form or another, has probably been around since settled agricultural societies, and often not prompted by skin color. In ancient Greece, a form of cultural racism was practiced against those who did not speak Greek and did not reside in a polis. This being the case, you were by definition a barbarian, and treated as such. By Roman times, hundreds of thousands were enslaved (the premier labor system of the day) and thus, de facto, seen as inferior. This often occurred simply because those enslaved were on the wrong side when Rome waged war. Africans were enslaving other Africans for when, circa 1500 CE, the whole process turned into big business with the introduction of white Christian slave traders. Racism in colonial North and South America (an important part of that big business) and subsequently the United States (the “land of the free”?) was endemic from the start. And, despite the fantasies of some southern governors, it never went away. Call it a cancer if you wish, but assuredly U.S. racism has been a chronic condition.
Despite its historically demonstrated staying power, Kendi believes there is a cure for systemic racism. He suggests the if you have an institution where whites, who are believed to be smarter than blacks, hold all positions of power, that institution will likely generate “policies that lead to racial inequities.” Because of the prevailing culture, few will see this as a problem. “But that same institution can eliminate those policies, can replace them with anti-racist policies that are leading to racial equity. There could be white people in senior positions and people of color in senior positions and there’s equity there, and people would view that as normal.” In this way “anti-racism can be a cure for racism.” Please note that the issue of class consciousness is not addressed.
Of course, there is more to it than that. Kendi has a book out entitled How to Be an Antiracist, in which he explains what it takes. One has to become aware that there is in fact a problem and understand its history and real consequences. Yet, there is a sense in which Kendi sees the answer to racism as an act of will. If so, it is a remarkably difficult to counter.
In the late 1950s and throughout the 1960s, enormous efforts were made in the U.S. to legally eliminate systemic racism within the public realm. Initially, it appeared to work. However, here we are, more than fifty years later, beset by a racist reactionary backlash that threatens the country with the likes of neo-ascist Republicans. Perhaps it was because a traditionally broad notion of personal freedom prevented the imposition of change within the private realm that the full goals of the Civil Rights Movement remained incomplete. In any case, the struggle goes on….and on.
Part IV—Global Warming
Then there is, perhaps, the ultimate of problems—human destruction of the environment. Those who monitor the natural environment have known, at least since the mid-19th century, that global warming linked to human activity was a reality, and only going to get worse if ignored. “In the 1860s, physicist John Tyndall recognized Earth’s natural greenhouse effect and suggested that slight changes in the atmospheric composition could bring about climatic variations. In 1896, a seminal paper by Swedish scientist Svante Arrhenius first predicted that changes in atmospheric carbon dioxide levels could substantially alter the surface temperature through the greenhouse effect.” As this knowledge became widespread it was denied and resisted, if not plainly ignored.
This should not be a surprise. Suffering a modicum of physical and financial discomfort, in other words checking human greed and giving up a bit of modernity’s physical ease today, so as to prevent something worse in the future goes against the human’s egocentric impulses, and our almost endless ability to rationalize. This goes along with the parallel situation. If humankind has now cast aside efforts to prevent apartheid and nuclear war, even after experiencing those horrors, why should we expect a successful collective effort to stave off the horrors of global warming, the material consequences of which are only now being felt by the general public? If we as a species follow “tradition” we will deal with this catastrophic global warming piecemeal and as inexpensively as possible. This will, predictably, turn out to be a deficient holding action against a long-term transformation that will make life much harder for the great majority of mankind (and many other species as well).
Part V— Conclusion
The apparent interminable nature of the problems cited above are hardly ever acknowledged by progressive activists. It is as if there must be a unilinear path to progress as the Enlightenment philosophers hoped. That means a positive end to all struggles against the nastiness inherent in the human condition. And, of course, historically, nastiness is sometimes overcome, sometimes only to be replaced by a different sort of nastiness. This is especially so in the realm of politics—where personal and group power comes into play.
Yet, even in areas where science and technology are applied so as to improve living conditions: cure or prevent disease, build better, more comfortable buildings, improve communications and the like—we often get in our own way. We invent cures and vaccines that some people refuse to take out of irrational fear or gross misunderstanding and, as a consequence, whole communities suffer plague and old diseases come back again for a second go-around. We construct buildings according to modern building codes which go unenforced in multiple parts of the globe, resulting in catastrophic loss of life when earthquakes occur. We invent marvelous communication networks which become the playgrounds of scammers, pornographers, and those addicted to chronic sales pitches and bad news.
One might be tempted to conclude that humankind’s abyssal awareness of accurate history is a blessing, because in its absence each generation feels it has a fresh start to do better than the last one. They almost always fail to achieve this goal, but the belief that it is possible is still seminally important. Where would we be if most of us understood the repetitive generational nature of our problems—problems that may well be deeply embedded in our cultures, if not our genes.
Now here is a corresponding truth. This apparently ongoing nature of our basic problems demands endless struggle. For instance, can you imagine how much worse things would be if no one struggled for peace or justice? In a way, it would be like living in a world, faced with repeated earthquakes, but having given up on building codes and their enforcement. Thus, those with sufficient awareness better continue to yell and scream as loud as they can about global warming and on-going threats to civilized society. To stop struggling in this fashion can only facilitate chaos—and its authoritarian consequences. For progressive activists there simply is no other choice even when confronted with the realities of what can reasonably be achieved. Let’s put it this way: there are no utopias in our foreseeable future, but there are a whole range of possible dystopias. We have already seen glimpses of some of these within living memory. It is to help hold those at bay that struggle is imperative.
