Neill Archer Roan posts a rather interesting thought on his weblog about what we’re all calling the ‘new normal’ for our economy, our society, and our work: what if the past 50 years were the exception, not the rule, to human history? What if the conditions we all considered to be ‘normal’ as we built our businesses, our industries, and our common sense were actually anomolies? He quotes a recent interview with Jim Collins in Fortune, who says:
It turns out that 1952 to 2000 was an aberration. We had a combination of tremendous stability brought on by two monolithic superpowers — danger, yes, but stability, combined with unprecedented prosperity. Very rarely in human history — maybe the Egyptian empire or 200 A.D. in Rome — only a few times you can go back and find those.
And yet, most of the nonprofit arts industry was born and evolved in that aberration. And what we consider ‘standards of practice’ could be standards for a universe that’s not coming back.
Which is not to suggest that arts organizations throw in the towel, but rather that it’s a good time to check ALL of our assumptions about what we do, how we do it, and what we define as success. And it also might be a good time to dust off our history books to see how arts and culture worked before 1952. There might be some useful ideas from the OLD normal that could be revived.
And, hence, our conversations at Project Audience that veered off into subjects like Slow Food and New Urbanism.
I’d encourage you, if you’re the reading type, to check out a few books by Jane Jacobs — if you’re feeling brave, start with her last book, “Dark Age Ahead.” But for something more relevant, “The Death and Life of Great American Cities,” and “Cities and the Wealth of Nations.”
I am more hopeful than she was in her last book. She felt that our civilization is forgetting those things that made it truly great. I feel we’re only beginning to remember what the modernists of the 20th century tried to eradicate.
In any case, as one other blogger pointed out, there is a lot of work to do in the face of the 20th century systems that refuse to change.
Many of the younger people I know who are designers and planners don’t seem to see solutions as being “pure.” In other words, while modernists tended to try to completely throw away the past, there’s a trend to try to meld what we once knew before the modernists, and what we’ve learned from the modernists and adapt it all to more sustainable models.
And it all leads back to Slow Food and New Urbanism, both of which try to apply older ideas to 20th century modernist concepts.
That was my very long-winded way of acknowledging that yes, post-war western society was an aberration; but no, I do not believe we’re necessarily looking at a dark age coming, either.
There’s also the question of the nuclear family, which in its isolation and mobility in modern culture is an aberration of history (at least up to now).
Much of the old normal lacks things like lights and heat and electricity, so I wonder how far back we can go.
It’s worth keeping in mind also that while perhaps some of the new normal that we all grew up with is turning out to have been temporary, a lot of it appears permanent. Collins is right that we should have our eyes wide open, and that cuts both ways.
There are prosaic examples — as noted above we’re not about to go back to not having electricity — and in some ways those things have very human (and humane) permanent impacts. (E.g. we’re not going to forget all the medical science and other knowledge that has driven infant mortality rates down, and life expectancies up, to levels never even imagined by the Romans or the Egyptians.) There are many examples of permanent change in basic social morays too, e.g. our major powers today unlike the Romans and Egyptians do not consider slavery to be a normal building block of a national economy. And etc.
All of those things and many more which are not being un-done, large and small, are relevant in ways large and small to the growth of the nonprofit arts sector since WWII. Collins is seeing only some of the trees in an enormous forest of long-term changes in human society. Some 50-year-old trees have fallen, no question, or have been chopped down due to our own short-sightedness; that doesn’t mean the forest as a whole is dying off.