The Downswing

After the Civil War, Reconstruction brought economic and political progress for former slaves, only to have both crushed by Southern white backlash. That same one step forward, two steps back happened again after decades of racial progress in the first half of the 20th century came to a halt following (ironically) the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s. The culprit, according to Robert Putnam and Shaylyn Romney Garrett in their book The Upswing, was again white backlash and a societal shift from communitarian values to selfishness. 

When we pull together, we all prosper; when we don’t, the disadvantaged get left behind. The course we take depends on the threats we perceive. When they are external, as they were in WW I and WW II, we put aside our differences to defeat the common enemy. If we see them as internal, however, from those among us who are not like us, for instance, our instinct is to weed them out. One might call the last four years under Gold Logo Man an attempt at a “Great Weeding Out.”

The thing about weeds, is they are persistent. Long term, it's hard to see how privileged gardeners can do much more than carve out small botanical sanctuaries for themselves.

What they are fighting is not weeds, but the diversity of our species, the very thing that enables us to survive plagues and pandemics, both viral and economic, that would wipe out a more homogeneous group.

Climate change is an existential threat, but it is not the only one. If we don’t nurture the diverse members of our society who give us the strength of heterogeneity, then even before the swollen seas of climate change swallow Miami, a great upheaval of the kind that inevitably follows the egocentric reigns of monarchies and despots will wash over us, leaving in its wake economic and political wreckage scattered over the landscape like the debris of ruined huts and foundered boats on a tropical beach after a tsunami.