The world of the 1950s and 1960s was coming to terms with peace, change, and having to cope with trauma. Many who had fought in the Second World War found jobs and partners and started families. But many also hid their anxiety, depression, fears, and nightmares. Soldiers who were the first to enter Belsen or Auschwitz never forgot. Those who landed on the beaches of Normandy and saw their best friends mowed down by machine gun fire did not feel lucky, only pain. Lost ones were not forgotten, but their loved ones moved on. Change was everywhere.
The peace after the war was always partial. A new state – Israel – was forming against the wishes of many in the Middle East, especially Palestinians who would be displaced and never believed in the promise of a “future” Palestinian state. Tensions were high across the region, and this was made worse when President Nasser seized the Suez Canal, coupled with France and Britain's failed attempt to stop him. Iraq – carved out of several states during the war settlements that followed the first world war – began to ferment and became ripe for a dictator, a role which Saddam Hussein obligingly subsequently filled, helped initially by Britain and the US.
In Africa, Kenya boiled over into civil conflict, and many died or fled in the face of the Mau-Mau rebellion. Rhodesia (now known as Zimbabwe) wanted independence and took it, only to lose its status as the bread-basket of Africa when President Mugabe hijacked the nation. Uganda discovered that useful idiots like Idi Amin make bad dictators. A time of unsettlement and disruption.
The Soviet Union, which had divided Germany as part of the spoils of war, threatened the world's stability and security in words and sometimes deeds. It did not seem to matter who ran Russia – Stalin, Malenkov, Khrushchev, Brezhnev, Andropov, Chernenko – they all seemed to want to use threats and bully-boy tactics to destabilize the world. Tensions.
Cuba, allied with Russia, experienced a revolution, and Fidel Castro looked at the US as “evil,” and the Americans did not like him. Not only was he smart and dynamic, but he was also radical. The Cuban missile crisis – a ship full of missiles on its way to communist Cuba from Russia to sit in position just a few miles off the Florida coast – had schoolchildren in Canada, the US and across the UK practicing what to do when the four-minute warning went off to make sure they would survive. School desks (then wooden) were, apparently, nuclear bomb proof. The world felt close to “the end.”
Spain, ruled by the dictator Franco, seemed strangely out of place in Europe, moving gradually towards greater cooperation and collaboration. When Franco eventually died in 1975, and the monarchy was restored, there was a sense that iSpain had returned to glacial normality. Bullfighting and Hemmingway happened, and one dictatorship quietly ended without a bloodbath, which is more than one can say about regime changes in Iran, Guatemala, the Dominican Republic, Chile, Nicaragua, the Philippines, Haiti and several other countries.
Most dramatically, the Romanian people decided in 1989 that they had had enough of Nicolae Ceaușescu and his wife Elena. They seized them, tried them and executed them on Christmas Day 1989, ending twenty-one years of corruption, brutality and oppression by these two and forty-two years of communist rule.
Baby boomers lived through these events. Some hardly noticed any of them, preoccupied with the latest fashion, the new music, the new view of sex, the new media and travel. But others – novelists, playwrights, composers, filmmakers, philosophers and acute observers – took particular notice and have tried to help the rest of us understand the shape of events, with some helping us in systematic ways to imagine their consequences.
Several other things have also changed in the period since 1950. The idea of distance is one. Growing up in Yorkshire, the idea that one could get on a flight and be in Vancouver within ten hours or Dubai in eight or that a train caught in London would take you to Paris was unthinkable and unaffordable. Now, we can chat with people worldwide using video conference technologies on hand-held devices. Travel and technology have changed radically, though both are still unaffordable and inaccessible to many.
The language barrier – very real for someone from Yorkshire, where diphthongs have been monophthongized and the glottal stop is very hard – is slowly coming down as wearable translation devices enable us to understand a person speaking in one of one hundred and forty languages. On a recent visit to Paris, such a device saved me twice from being served tripe in restaurants.
Also different is our access to ideas, music, and art. Sitting at a desk, in a coffee shop, on a bus or train, I can watch a documentary, listen to Brahms, look at a continuous loop of impressionist paintings, read a book describing the history of pirates, I can listen to exceptionally gifted colleagues sharing ideas, understanding and experience in what is now called a “podcast.” The democratization of knowledge is a remarkable achievement, now aided by generative AI.
The place of women in society has also changed, at least in Canada and most of Europe. Women can engage in democracy, lead corporations, marry who they choose (a man or woman), decide when or if they have children and have a strong voice in how we live our lives. Current attempts in several US states to return women to their 1864 status reflect the anxiety that weak white men feel when they lose control of the future. Women are fighting back. The first-ever women Vice President of the United States, who is also a woman of colour and a South Asian, is one champion of this resistance. There is still much equality to fight for, but progress has been made in a generation.
Dramatically, the nature of work has changed, thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic. More people are now working from home, more flexible working, more gig work, more job sharing, more work-life balance contracts, and more engagement in decision-making. Not all can leverage these changes, but they are reshaping our understanding of work. More changes will happen here, as we all learn to dance with robots and let AI do some of the work for us.
The cultural landscape is also much richer, thanks to streaming music and video, Taylor Swift, global touring and new writing, music, drama, dance, art and film. Banksy makes us smile and think. Alan Bennett keeps us concerned about social issues through his plays and dry, humour-filled writing. Yuja Wang shows us that outstanding performance skills can be matched with exceptional beauty. iTunes and Spotify give us access to wonderful sounds and videos, as does YouTube. New ballet performances – Alberta ballets Joni Mitchell and Elton John ballets – and new large-scale orchestral works, like those of Pulitzer and Grammy award-winning Kevin Puts, are all signs that creativity and performance are alive and well, despite shrinking government investment in the arts.
Some developments appear to be going in the wrong direction. Democracy is one of these things. Looking at the coming election in the US, it seems that the choice is between support for a decaying democracy led by an elderly man or fascism led by an elderly sex offender, serial liar and frequent fraudster. Ideologues and dictators are again everywhere. According to the Varieties of Democracy Institute, 70% of the world's population lives under a dictatorship, with fifty-nine countries classified as dictatorships. What is more, tracing these developments over time shows that democracy is in decline. We can see it with our own eyes in the United States.
Increasing authoritarian rule results in a decline in the freedom of speech and the freedom of expression. As Bertram Russell observed, "The first step in a fascist movement is the combination under an energetic leader of a number of men who possess more than the average share of leisure, brutality, and stupidity. The next step is to fascinate fools and muzzle the intelligent, by emotional excitement on the one hand and terrorism on the other." There a lot of useful idiots, many of them residing in Florida, Texas and Arizona.
One target of these anti-democrats and the fascists is something they name “woke” culture, better known as a commitment to social and economic justice for all and a rejection of bigotry, prejudice, misogyny, discrimination, and racism. They do not like it. In addition to challenging their own belief system, it threatens the basis for profits from exploitation. That is what really concerns them.
Looking back, what is also different about the present moment is that many are very confused about who they are and why they are here. Their identity is “fuzzy,” “confused,” or displaced.
Some are lost and suffer anxiety, stress, or depression. Some are exceptionally anxious about the end of the world because of climate change and our inability to act in a way that may make the planet a tolerable place to inhabit. Yet others are made anxious by the uncertainty over all our futures due to our seeming inability to engage in discourse and to agree to disagree but to do so in a spirit of mutuality and respect.
Growing up, we were allowed to use the word “tolerance” to describe understanding others, especially those we disagreed with. Soon after understanding the complexity of “tolerance,” it fell out of favour as a construct—condescending, insufficient, and wrong-headed. Instead, I use Ubuntu—the African idea of interconnectedness and interdependence: “I am because we are!” instead of “I think; therefore, I am!”
The future is never a straight line from the past. It is always a wiggly line, but the past shapes the present and the future pulls us towards it. The future will be better if we take the time to understand the past.
Best, most thought-provoking AND most worrying post ever, Stephen