Interesting Times Endgame

 

“May you live in interesting times” was once thought to be a translation of an ancient Chinese curse – but it turns out that the phrase can’t be found in English much earlier than the mid 1930s, and can’t be found in known ancient Chinese sayings at all.

 

That tracks with the fate of many of the “everyone knows” certainties that once ran society, sometimes badly, but always in control.  Most are gone now and the rest are going, but we have created nothing to replace them.

 

General Motors filed for bankruptcy Monday.  In the early 1950s, that would have been as plausible a statement as “states legalize same-sex marriage.”

 

GM was the largest employer in the world if you didn’t count the Soviet Union, and when GM President Charles Wilson was nominated for secretary of defense, he could tell a Senate committee that he didn’t see any looming conflicts "because for years I thought what was good for the country was good for General Motors and vice versa." The Senate found that reassuring, not funny.

 

Bob and Bill not only didn’t marry in the late 40s and early 50s, they couldn’t marry; same-sex marriage would have been as illegal as mixed-race marriage, then banned in 30 of the 48 states. And if Bob and Bill did decide to live together in some quiet, out-of-the-way place, they were “roommates,” and in any event weren’t going to trumpet their arrangement in the social columns of the local newspapers.

 

Not that the local newspapers would have printed such things, most being “family-oriented,” and almost all being such rock-solid money-making machines that they were passed from generation to generation as a princely inheritance.

 

Families consisted of a Dad, who worked, and a Mom who took care of the home and the children. Single parents, unless they were widows or widowers, were not mentioned in polite society.

 

The list of What Was Certain Then could go on because most things then were certain or at least unquestioned, which amounted to the same thing. Looking back, some of them now seem quaint and laughable, some of them now seem evil and unforgiveable, but in their time they were as certain as the next sunrise.

 

The problem of our time is that we have pretty much tossed the list of What Was Certain Then, but we search in vain for a list of What Is Certain Now.

 

We have deliberately rejected many of the old certainties and time has whittled down others, but nothing has been created in their place. We have replaced a shared concept of “ideal” with a list of options, being careful not to let one seem more attractive than the other.

 

A world of infinite options isn’t sustainable. As long as our universe is governed by a concept called Time, one of those options must always be selected.

 

Call them “interesting times” or “perilous times” or “times of uncertainty” or anything else that give you a convenient mental coat-hook, but whatever they are called they now face all of us as across a chess table and say “Your move.”

 

Endgame, anyone?

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