I'm reading (another) book about 19th Century Russia, this one a biography about Bakunin and it set me to thinking about living through a period where the structures of an existing society are crumbling.
So here is a bird's eye view of history of the period with some reflections on modern parallels.
Russia emerged as a cohesive power at the beginning of the 19th Century. The story I'm concerned with begins with Alexander I (1801-1825) and the war with Napoleon. This was followed by the Decembrist coup attempt and crack down by Nicholas I (1825-1855). During this period Russian society stagnated while the industrial revolution transformed the UK, France and Germany.
Literature of the period is full of stories of the constricted life of the upper class. Men tended their family estate, worked in the civil service or the military. One of the novels that captures the tension between this declining class and the emerging professional class is "Oblomov" by Ivan Goncharov.
The use of serfs led to a marginal productive system as many estates were hardly above the subsistence level. Slaves have little incentive to work more than the minimum to sustain themselves. Even after serfdom was abolished in 1861 the actual living conditions changed little. Russia failed to industrialize. Chekhov is another writer who described this declining society, although at a slightly later period.
So the 19th Century was a 100 year period in which the feudal society became increasingly less viable, but society was unable to replace it with something newer. The results were inevitable, a revolution in which most of the old ruling class was killed or driven into exile. But the poor organizational arrangement under the Czars left no government infrastructure. The civil service had been thoroughly corrupt and run by cronyism, there were no real professional bureaucrats. Contrast this with France where the governments change periodically but the wheels of government (mostly) keep turning.
As the literature and philosophical writings of the period show, many understood the contradictions of Russian society, but the autocratic regime allowed for no gradual evolution. As an aside we see that the same pattern emerged after the 1917 revolution. The czars were replaced by the nomenklatura and autocratic rulers who also permitted no social evolution. This led to the eventual collapse in the 1990's. It would appear that history is now repeating for the third time as any attempts at democratic reform are slowly being squeezed out of modern Russia, but that discussion is for another time.
Why I bring up the history of 19th Century Russia is because of the parallels to today. The industrialized world is locked in an obsolete economic and social system based upon capitalism and consumerism. The basic premises of cheap and essentially unlimited natural resources, continual growth, and wide economic inequality are only being discussed by the modern intelligentsia, just as the limitations of Russian society were only examined by the intellectual fringe of that period. At that period such discussions were restricted by the state. Many publications were censored and their writers jailed or forced into exile. These days media monopoly effectively performs the same function. In the west anyone can criticize society, but can they find an outlet where they will reach an audience?
In some senses the problems today are worse. Not only are the threats to society global, but there is little understanding of what to do next. Russia had the examples of societies that had transformed from peasant to industrial to use as a model for adaptation. That they chose to ignore these developments was a political decision made by the elite who wished to maintain their old way of life. The world has no successful models to point to for our examples. There are no post-industrial societies. There are no societies that have transitioned to a static (or slowly falling) population. There are no societies that have solved the demographic shifts to an older population. We have not even been able to devise processes for how to approach these problems.
Internal democratic societies are not truly democratic. They are oligarchies or plutocracies with a veneer of democratic elections, but those away from the centrist positions never gain any power and never influence social policy in a dramatic way. International institutions have no enforcement powers and have remained the tools of the industrialized nations. Recent developments such as the breakdown of WTO talks shows that this soft power is starting to fail. The results have been the rise in the use (or threatened use) of military power. As a succession of failed wars from Vietnam to Iraq have shown this technique does not work anymore either. Societies can be destroyed, but cannot be made into clients.
Those in the 19th Century turned to a steady stream of philosophers for inspiration from Hegel to Marx and with many Utopians along the way. The discussions of these new ideas served as a cornerstone of educational efforts. The fear that exposure to such new ideas would affect the public was the primary reason that autocratic regimes tried to suppress them. Today the media is controlled by a handful of powerful companies. In the US there are only six: Viacom, GE, Disney, Time Warner, News Corp and Bartlesman. The situation in Europe is similar. There is no explicit control on ideas as can be seen in the large number of opinion magazines and the recent rise of the blogosphere, but so far their effect is small.
Freedom of speech means little if the channels of communication are limited. Education is the only route to change. If it is suppressed then social conditions continue to deteriorate and the public is not given a chance to participate in planning for change. Eventually reality intervenes and the result is a violent convulsion. In most cases things don't get much better even if the former social structure is overthrown. As I see it we have two tasks, to debate ideas for a new economic and social order, and to get these ideas out to the wider public. We don't know who the next Hegel or Marx will be, we don't even know if their ideas will be realistic, but we have to create a space where such ideas can grow.
The alternative will be unimaginable. We already see the signs of a possible global conflict as frictions in the poorer states of the world become more common and violent. Africa and the Middle East are already in flames. Russia is about to provoke an international incident over energy supplies, and Latin America is moving in unpredictable directions. All these are signs that the old world order is crumbling, but there are no cohesive plans on how to adapt.
Remember all the most influential thinkers of the period were obscure men. It is our task to foster such men (and women this time) to step forward with new ideas. Unlike the 19th Century we have the mechanisms to spread new ideas rapidly and to debate them on an international scale. What took weeks and months and reached only a tiny audience in those days can now happen in hours and reach thousands.
Thinkers of the world break free of your chains of conventional thinking!