OVO

[From an e-mail message to a friend...]

I don’t claim to have any answers on this one, specifically any always-applicable answers. But I have benefited from adopting a note of caution any time I find myself thinking of ‘tipping points’ in history.

Over and again I’ve thought ‘there’s no way that the bad guys can keep getting away with it, this time they’ve gone too far, the tipping point has arrived.’ And I’ve been wrong every time.

When I apply that steady record of error to past events, I think it holds. It is easy to look back and say where tipping points where in history, but it is so easy that I wonder if it isn’t me imposing a pattern that didn’t really exist at the time. I can see the pattern in what you wrote about Mussolini and Hitler [they were supported by their nations but eventually there was a popular / middle class strike against them], but the pattern is so clear that I wonder if it is the filter I’m looking through rather than seeing something as it was.

Tipping point thinking fits in with my lefty / conspiracy background, something else I’ve grown to trust less. It came from a time when some part of me thought history was (a) going somewhere and (b) something I / we / someone could drive like a wagon train. Now I think history is going, but not going anywhere in particular. I want it to be going towards empowerment of the individual, but it isn’t – it’s just going where it’s going. I want to think I / we / someone can nudge history a little tiny bit, but that’s a far cry from seizing the reigns and plowing a path towards utopia.

Fascist Spain didn’t have a turning point, as far as I know. It changed, but there wasn’t a popular / middle class strike against it. The tyranny in North Korea and elsewhere goes on and on. This is evidence of another old belief of mine being in error – that oppression leads to rebellion. It doesn’t, not consistently.

I have [fewer and fewer] answers as I get older. And less sense that my opinions have any influence in the world. What a relief!