Bad Times

Bad times are times of opportunity. Opportunity for bad people to be worse, because when things are a mess they can scavenge the wreckage, steal and profit. Opportunity for good people to change things that led to the bad times, the case for reform and restitution proven beyond peradventure by the bad times themselves.

If there is one outstanding feature of the current bad times, the Trump-Putin times, this Age of Lying, this recurrence to violence in place of discussion – though heaven knows, the latter has ever only been partially successful in damping down the use of killing to make a point – it is that the nobler principles on which Right has rested its case against Might get no traction with the Bad Timers, who regard the Old Timers and their soft answers – the ones intended to turn away wrath – as mere obstacles, and futile ones at that, who crumple at a blow. But there is something that the Bad Timers do not know, fatally for them in the longer run. They do not know history.

History, you see, is apt to bring in its revenges. History is the story of the recurrent defeat of the recurrent uprising of Bad Timers. As the centuries have accumulated since the rise of Sumer in pre-antiquity, the length of time that Bad Timers have maintained control has progressively shortened, the length of the intervals between their appearance lengthened. This phenomenon has become especially marked since Louis XIV lost his head. But even before then, the realisation that abusive power is a self-defeating thing restrained plenty of power-holders out of prudence; and restraint on power is a good thing for everyone.

Bad Timers are defeated because they are in the minority, and the majority quickly come to dislike them because they dislike being oppressed and dispossessed by them. Not that the majority of the majority are, necessarily, notably decent folk themselves; but at least they are self-interested enough not to enjoy being trampled on. And when they are trampled on they find appealing what would defend them if applied: principles of fairness, truth, and the mutual respect for liberties that benefit themselves as well as others. Liberties as in liberty not licence, which is what ‘libertarians’ (Neoliberals, Far Right, Bad Timers) claim for themselves: the freedom to prey on others, to trample on them; the freedom to make others unfree.

A very great deal follows from joining dots here. Think of the typical Bad Timer outlook. The cluster of symptoms, perm any subset, includes the vaunting of profit, nationalism, xenophobia bleeding into racism, the elevation of the powerful above the reach of law, persecution of opposition, militarism, indifference to the suffering let alone the needs and certainly not the interests of any who interrupt their pursuit of the foregoing. The lust for power in today’s world is the same thing as the lust for money: having power is being able to have and do what you want, which is precisely the facility that money buys.

Or – to be a tad less rhetorical – money and power are almost the same thing. Having absolute power makes having money unnecessary. I don’t suppose Kim Jung-Un, whose situation in life is the paradigm of what Trump would like, is interested in money for himself. It would be like Monopoly money to him. But Trump, somewhere in the reaches of his dim self-awareness, knows that he will not be President for ever, and he and his family have been creaming the opportunity to stack up billions by the most blatant acts of corruption since the days of Louis XVI.

Ah: Louis XVI again. The name should ring warning bells. In fact anyone tempted to the abuse of power should have a little list on his refrigerator door – Caligula, Nero… – as a prompt to meditation on the fate that greets such.

There is another way that history brings in its revenges. It is an uncompromising judge. Its credit and debit columns are stark in their unqualified entries. In the credit column go the names of humankind’s benefactors, in the debit column those of its malefactors. If I thought I might be penned in along with Hitler and Pol Pot I’d hasten to mend my ways. Anyone would prefer to be listed along with Mahatma Ghandi and Nelson Mandela. Hitler and Pol Pot are egregious examples, true, and a debit-credit binary by its nature leaves out the nuances that suggest some (if not indeed most) candidates should be in a third ‘this but that’ column. However, history does not regularly inscribe its ledger that way. So Trump and Putin will go in along with Hitler and Pol Pot, and be damned accordingly: figures of hate and contempt. Perhaps, as they smash their way about, that they do not care what history thinks. More likely, Putin thinks he is a Rurik or Ivan the Terrible, founder of a new imperium by restitution of the old; if Trump had thoughts rather than mere emotions and delusions, he might think he is Augustus. But history will hate them, conferring its imprimatur on what we feel today.

This is at least some consolation: that these figures will sink into the sewers of the historical record. Better is the thought that, because we suffer from what they do, we again try to so fashion things that we avoid a repeat of their like. Reformers, true reformers, go into history’s credit column: a far, far better place to find your worth than in the credit column of your account at the bank.