“What’s New?” we ask each other ritually, and there is generally a ready answer at hand. Journalism, with its vested interest in change, has become enormously more pervasive and influential, first from television, and then the internet, ans perhaps this influence has been felt in the form of an increased national conviction that we are transforming ourselves in a way that has never happened before. And sober historians as well as sensationalizing beat hacks have both make the ame point as part of the rhetoric. From Alvin Toffler, to Obama, to the gossip in the Rupert Murdoch rags, they call into question the very relevance of past history to contemporary events, so drastic do they consider what is often termed “the great mutations” of the post-modern age.
Not surprisingly, such sweeping statements, even dressed as junk-social science theories, have evoked a counterattack. Many still insist that hte past is as relevant as it ever was; that change in our time differs only in degree and not in kind from change in the past. The human individual faces the same challenges and limitations articulated by the Cordoban thinkers like Maimonides or Saint Augustine; the fault lies in the change-intoxicated messengers, exercising a form of secular messianism, who have themselves remained so inflexible in their thinking as to be unable to see the matter in perspective. Elizabeth L. Eisenstein once wtoe, ” A sense of remoteness from a precious cultural heritage, has been a familiar emotion all through the ages,” back from the lamentations of the Old Testament prophets; the late Roman Empire was as concerned about the possible extinction of its civilization as we are of ours; while the “recurrent sense of standing on the threshold of a new age” has marked each generation in turn since about 1800. In our wild and dangerous times, the thought that everything is basically “la meme chose” is reassuring, and at the least it may serve as a corrective to Greenspan’s “irrational exuberance” or generalized overenthusiasm. But the evidence is overwhelming that the winds of change do blow more strongly now, and that America in recent years has been in a kind of Cave of the Winds. ( to be continued)…