Protest and historical change - 28 April 1978

I read somewhere the other day where an eminent man was saying – I forget who, now – that … I know, it was Lawrence Durrell, the famous novelist. He said that “History is a total waste of time.”

Well, the late Henry Ford, the godfather of the cheap car, is remembered in America by most people, I should say, for two things: the assembly-line automobile, and the single saying of his that has stuck, “History,” he said, “is bunk.”

I think he meant by this that if you try to learn from history, you won’t succeed, because in every time there are new elements that you won’t take in, and those are the new elements that will determine the immediate future. So it’s not quite so philistine a phrase as it sounds.

If Henry Ford had been a devoted student of the history of transport, if he’d moved in his mind from the ox to the wheel and the horse and carriage, he might have arrived in the end at the idea that what was needed was a faster bus or a more luxurious car. But the new idea that struck him was not bigger or better cars, but the quite original idea of a car for everybody.

The suspicious thing you know about history books is their confidence in dividing time up into so-called “periods.” Historians invent periods like the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the Reformation, and then they magnetise all the available facts like iron filings and dump them into these periods. But did the people at the time know they were living in the Renaissance? They’d never heard of it.

We now talk confidently about 1910 to, say, 1945 as the Twilight of Empire. Well I was around for all of that time and we, we in Britain certainly, didn’t go round peering through any twilight. The loss of the British Empire in fact was one of the biggest shocks of the Second World War. Mr Churchill at one time maintained that the war was being fought to “save” the empire, and I don’t remember anyone saying, “But when this war’s over and we’ve won, there won’t be any empire to save.”

I remember now Mr Durrell going on to explain his remark about histories being a waste of time by adding, “History is the endless repetition of the wrong way of living.” Another way of saying that is, unfortunately the men who direct history – the statesmen and politicians, businessmen, inventors and so on – don’t know enough history to learn by it.

Well no doubt there are nippers now alive who 30, 40, 50 years from now will grow up to be historians, who can tell us that the 1970s and '80s constituted a period called The Decay of Capitalism, or the Collapse of Communism, or the Computer Age. Or, more likely, some label we wouldn’t even recognise because we don’t know what the really big movements of our time are. We are too deep in the trees to know whether it’s a forest we’re in or an ambush. But when you look back, you can do it, proving once again the old line of the American football coach who said, “Hindsight always has 20/20 vision.”

Now if you ask me what we thought we were doing at San Francisco 33 years ago when we set up the United Nations, well the wise ones knew that for as long as we’d live, one of the main political problems would be putting the old colonial empires, intact, under the care of the old colonial powers and other powers on a new basis. It was to be called the Trusteeship System.

We never anticipated the rise of the black man, the rush for independence or the universal rush of country people to the cities, and the consequent vast and equally universal problems of overpopulated cities, a huge increase in city crime, let alone drugs or the worldwide growth of terrorism. Least of all did we anticipate the overwhelming traffic problems of every big city on earth – the morning invasion, the evening exodus, one man, one car – which, if there’s a strike or the Arabs jack up the price of oil, can paralyse industry and in no time strangle a nation’s prosperity.

Henry Ford had as much to do with this as anyone, so in the long run he was nothing like so much of an ignoramus as he first sounded.

All this comes up because this spring our magazines and papers and television have been looking back to 1968, and what I thought of at the time (and surprisingly still think of) as the black year: Martin Luther King assassinated in April; Bobby Kennedy in June; Washington rioting and patrolled by armoured cars; Baltimore burning; the streets of Chicago gone berserk during the Democratic Convention. And through it all, the marches and more riots and random violence that erupted from the anti-Vietnam protests; university presidents being besieged in their offices’; bombings, flag burnings, and so on and on.

Now the heroes or the villains of that time, certainly the people most directly recognisable as rebel leaders, were the Chicago Seven and the Berkeley Boys and Eldridge Cleaver, who felt at one time that a black man’s rape of a white woman was an obligation, a necessary symbolic act.

I’ve forgotten the names of the other student leaders, of the Panthers and the Weathermen and the Students for a Democratic Society so-called, but I’m sure I’ve remembered Eldridge Cleaver because he is the most dramatic example of the difference between the young rebels of 1968 and the same men ten years later.

Cleaver, out on a federal criminal charge, escaped abroad, thought to embrace his own origins in Africa, stayed away for years. But he’s come back. He’s willing to face the old charges. He’s convinced, he says, that America is worth living in and living for. He is a quite forthright penitent. He doesn’t say that he made stupid mistakes or errors of tactics. He says he sinned, and all his revolutionary fervour has gone into his conversion to Christianity.

Very few of the others, I imagine, have made such a complete about-face, but almost all of them have had long second thoughts about their role in the 1968 rebellion. They meditate a good deal about it. One or two even go on the lecture circuit, telling a generation of quite different types that they were wrong to be so violent about overthrowing a system whose working, whose possibilities of creative working, they did not understand.

Most of them have sobered considerably by way of dress, hairstyle and what we call lifestyle. They’re married, they have children, they go to offices. They work in city government. They teach in schools or universities, but they seem to be teaching more chemistry or history or social science than rebellion, which reminds us of the old crack during the more radical days of the Depression: a liberal is a Communist with a wife and two children.

When these sobered rebels talk to college audiences, they must be more aware than anybody not of changes in America perhaps, but of great changes in the youth of the late 1970s.

The generation now in college may have only faint personal memories of 1968 and there’s nothing much to show that they’ve followed the Cleaver and Weathermen and similar histories except in television documentaries. But after talking to some of them and wondering about their surprising sobriety – or, if you like, inaction – I gather that they do not hold the same romantic view of the alternatives to the American system of government that the boys of '68 did. Many of them, though they had few illusions about the Soviet Union, did harbour the dream that Communism or at least a workers' and student revolution could be made to produce more equal justice, more equal rights without dictatorship and its accompanying barbarities.

In Europe, I suppose this growing belief has produced Eurocommunism. Well if the surveys of the present college generation are anything to go on, this belief is, in America, highly suspect. The heroes of the non-conformists of today (wherever they are) seem to be not Cohn-Bendit or the old Cleaver or Trotsky converted into a dynamic leader of the Democratic Party. Their heroes seem to be the exiled dissidents and the imprisoned dissidents of the Soviet Union, the men who’ve risked a great deal, sometimes their lives, to defy and denounce the fake psychiatric asylums, the prison camps, the suppression of liberty in the Soviet Union.

We don’t hear much about present college radicals. Indeed the surveys say that a sizeable majority of college students today are strikingly conservative. They go to college under the extraordinary impression that they’ve gone there to study, not to dictate what shall be taught. Their rebellious instincts have conformed to the new conformity of settling down not into marriage, but into what used to be called “companionate marriage” and is now called “mating”.

Nobody should infer from this that the bad days are long gone and that the violence and despair are over. A college generation, after all, is four years at most. And another Depression, another black uprising – and, among the blacks, unemployment is worse than it was ten years ago – could spark another reaction against the conservatism, the calm of the present undergraduate.

The good sign of something permanently learned is the number of college men and women who are active in a far less dramatic and ideological way in the society they live in. In other words, they don’t burn buildings in defiance of the Vietnam War. They mount protests with placards and marches against the arrival of pornographic shops and hustlers and pimps on streets close by the campus. They enrol for the voluntary care of handicapped children. They get into local politics. They complain not about police brutality, but about the lax state of police security for women students who have been, or are likely to be, assaulted. They are at their books by day and by night they rocket up in their rooms. They’ve given up cigarettes, but they may occasionally smoke pot. They attend town meetings of citizens protesting this or that. They give some spare time to work in the slums.

It may not be enough to contain the violence and squalor of the world they are growing up to, but for the time being it does seem to be a sane legacy from the wilder days of '68.

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