When life is unstable, anything can happen. This truth holds for all living beings: individuals, families, communities, and societies.
Exhibit A: Between 1968 and 1971, the earth beneath my feet began to rumble and shake. My father, with whom I had been closely identified, died of pancreatic cancer. I had lived my life trying to fulfill his. He had imagined himself an historian and a writer. I was then a graduate student in history and writing poetry. I was active in Civil Rights and anti-war protests, as he had been a part of the socialist movements of the 1930’s and 1940’s. I talked softly as he did, though with greater animation.
When he died, I grew despondent and inert. I was lost. For a long while I’d bury myself in detective novels and the obsessive knots of macramé.
In my despair, I abruptly left academia and the secure future of a tenured track professorship — even though I had already completed my course work and written a full draft of my dissertation. I didn’t know where I was going, but somehow I knew that I had to lift the burden of my father’s dreams from my shoulders to discover my own.
With a minimum of knowledge or reflection, I leaped into the all-consuming “humanistic group movement,” with its T-groups, encounter groups, and psychodrama, and the never-ending conversations that extended the ensuing therapeutic themes far into the night. We learned and learned about our psyches and souls, hoping to eventually humanize the materialist society into which we had been born.
To make a living, I got a job with the Massachusetts Law Reform Institute, where I tried to bring police, judges, and convicts together — with limited success, of course. But the work was thrilling. We strove to bring affordable housing to the suburbs, to stop the Census because it inadequately counted Black and Brown people, and immigrants, too. I was an outsider, the only non-lawyer, but that suited me.
These two activities, psychotherapy and political organizing, emerging from the rubble of my life, planted the seeds of my work for the next five decades.
The most surprising and possibly the most powerful change came with the birth of my daughter. I had been raised a traditional male. I expected to work while my former wife, who was smart, with professional aspirations — would step in as the primary caregiver. But that wasn’t her idea. And as she absented herself, I became my daughter’s main caregiver instead. The story of my leap into parenting, into nurturance and patience, is too long and complex to tell now, and I have written of it before in other essays. But in short, I think it transformed me, tempering my restlessness and ambition. There was a little girl to take care of and I did that for a good part of every day. That experience shook me loose from the manhood I had anticipated. For a few years, I alternated between feeling lost and feeling found in a larger, more integrated character.
Oh, and soon my wife and I divorced, in 1971. Again, I felt alone and lost. In retrospect, though, I look back on 1968 as beginning a long, often confusing, sometimes painful, and mostly exhilarating and productive journey.
Societies encounter comparable and infinitely more complex moments. The physicist, Ilya Prigogine, distilled the key to transformational change this way: Systems in disequilibrium are vulnerable to change; the outcomes of such change are generally unpredictable and massive. During the 1980’s this formulation unlocked many doors for me, particularly when families I worked with needed fundamental, not minor, change. And, of course, it helped me understand that the chain reaction that began for me in 1968 was just such an event.
Exhibit B: Most observers would agree that the United States sits at just such an inflection point, very much in disequilibrium, and therefore extremely vulnerable to major changes. And as Prigogine proposed, the direction of those changes appear beyond our ability to predict with any great accuracy.
Here’s a very brief sketch of our American disequilibrium. With 70% of Trump’s 70,000,000 voters convinced that he actually won the election and that Biden stole it, the credibility of the new government is fractured and potentially volatile. We’ve seen hints of what might happen when White nationalist militias planned to kidnap Michigan’s governor. The Black Lives Matter movement, with its massive protests, has also challenged the government’s legitimacy from the Left. The Covid-19 pandemic is raging out of control; the divided response to masks, vaccines, and government-led discipline keeps us divided and on the edge of instability. As do the paranoid pseudo theories that form the basis of the Trumpites resistance. The environment is dangerously degraded; global warming is virtually beyond our control. The hacking of American defense systems, likely by Russia and with Trump’s tacit acquiescence, threatens military conflict.
Like the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand that lit the fuse that exploded into World War I, we have created, or fallen to, a comparably vulnerable moment. We imagine that these moments are rare, even across the vast expanse of world history, but they are too frequent for comfort.
During the years leading up to the American Revolution, for instance, the future was far from clear. Restiveness and rebellion against monarchic rule began to flash and build. Think of the Boston Tea Party and publication of Thomas Paine’s Common Sense. Then The Revolutionary War. Even during and after the colonists emerged victorious, a large percentage of the colonial population opposed a separate union, preferring to remain British subjects
While we’d like to judge this experience by the positive outcome – a country of our own, established on principles we value – there was no consensus about where the War would take us. Internal struggle to the point of combustion was a reasonable gambler’s option. The interests of one colony were pitted against those of others, and the differences were vast. So, too, the interests of the poor vis-à-vis those of the moneyed classes; and no one in power was concerned at all about the interests of the slaves. The eventual constitutional democracy represented an amalgam that few —not even James Madison, chief architect of the Constitution — had fully envisioned ahead of time.
The era leading to the Civil War was also a time of growing disequilibrium. When I was a American history graduate student, my professor assigned a paper: “Talk about the inevitability of the Civil War.” In my typical contrarian way, I argued that the outcome was not inevitable, but that with each approaching year, each widening of the sectional divide, the probabilities increased. Nor could we have anticipated Lincoln’s assassination, or the national “Reconstruction” activities that reinforced rather than improved the position of southern Blacks. These post-War shenanigans consolidated the division of North and South that lasts to this day.
By the end of WW1, a defeated Germany – its population, its economy, its social and educational institutions – was suffering terribly. Penalties imposed by the Versailles Treaty, coupled with the Great Depression, provided an archetypal moment of disequilibrium. Early in 1920’s, Germany had adopted the liberal Weimar democracy. In what seemed like just a moment later, the Nazi and Communist Parties exploded onto the streets, growing exponentially as they divided Germany. Then came the take over of the Reichstag, the German Parliament, inspired and facilitated by the innovative Nazi propaganda machine, which utilized radio technology to activate and organize the populist grievances of a people that had so resented their defeat in World War I. And then, Hitler’s evil dominance, which historians have been trying to explain ever since. Like the American Revolution, no one could have predicted the emergence of Hitler out of the rubble, disequilibrium, of World War I and its aftermath.
Exhibit C?: No one — least of all, me — could have predicted the course of my life as it unfolded after 1968, though I have often tried to develop a coherent narrative to give it shape and meaning. No matter the narrative, I am mostly pleased with the life I’ve lived. None of us can predict, with any certainty, the course of the next decade in the United States. The ground beneath our feet is rumbling. Our nation is divided. Technology, disease, and the struggle for human justice have combined to create an unstable, unpredictable mix.
I believe that the Biden transition team is trying hard and working well to cool the atmosphere, to steady our institutions and perceptions, to soften the conflict between Democrats and Republicans, between the haves and the have-nots. But I’m not sure their efforts will be soon enough and strong enough. It is unclear to me whether a massive, unpredictable crisis is truly in the making—or when it will erupt, and what directions it will eventually take.
Possibly, we will dissolve and reconstitute as an authoritarian state. But it’s also possible that the crisis will serve primarily as a powerful test of our mettle and of our commitment to a democratic and pluralistic society—and that we will re-form it according to our bedrock values, to our great size, and to the realities of the social media. If that is so, then the struggles will have filled us with energy and a far more realistic optimism.
Barry Dym 