the endurance of paradigms / the gradualness of social change
Eighteenth and nineteenth century revolutions were inspired by Enlightenment ideas like democracy, equality, republicanism. A part of the movement went further by asserting that political democracy is vitiated under conditions of plutocracy. People might all have a vote, but Big Money influence usually prevails re: governmental policy, so in order to have effective political democracy we have to extend democracy into the economic sphere. That requires social ownership and control of society’s major productive assets (instead of private ownership and control). Those ideas sounded good and right to some people and thus was born the socialist movement during the 1820s, two hundred years ago. It had enormous appeal for a while, but it seemed to get discredited when the early implementations were disappointing. They were overly statist, bureaucratic, institutional, impersonal and in some cases even authoritarian. A paradigm developed identifying socialism with Big Government and even totalitarianism. It has been two generations now that the socialist movement has been marginalized due to that association. When Bernie Sanders talks about “democratic socialism” he really means European-style social democracy (welfare statism). The idea of nationalization of industries remains anathema. If there is a socialist revival, based on re-thinkings of the concept, within a generation or two … well, the movement could be three hundred years old before claiming real success in regard to its transformational aspirations.
We know why the United States government tolerates the Gaza genocidal horror. It’s on account of the power of the Lobby. But the Lobby doesn’t hold the same sway in Europe, so why do the governments of those countries tolerate it? The reason has to do with a paradigm of guilt and sympathy from centuries of antisemitism that culminated in the Holocaust. That guilt and sympathy has given the Israeli government carte blanche to perpetrate injustices and apartheid. The paradigm has endured for generations now and is fading only slowly.
Why is the “greening” movement advancing only incrementally? It’s because there’s a tendency to identify it with a paradigm that invokes supposedly negative “Sixties” images — hippie communes, peacenik kumbaya, earth spirituality, “flower-power,” granola, social and cultural disruption. At least two generations since the 1960s have disdained that paradigm. The disdain is fading only gradually.
