The morning after the election, Gloria Steinem said on NPR that it was a vote against the future, but the future is going to happen anyway. She sums up well some wisdom we all need. For there are changes coming, changes that have been underway for a long time, having to do with the growth of human consciousness and conscience concerning matters of social justice. The issues include the right to a living wage, universal healthcare, providing haven for refugees, opposing racist mentalities and practices, breaking down old barriers of gender and sexuality, caring for the environment and our fellow creatures, openness to a variety of religious beliefs and traditions, on and on—the issues continue to proliferate. Nor are these the rallying cries of some leftist fringe. In 1891, in his encyclical Rerum Novarum, Pope Leo XIII—hardly a leftwing agitator—pronounced it a human right to receive a living wage, something that should not be left to the vicissitudes of the free market. This is merely one example. Each of the causes listed above has a variety of supporters from many walks of life.
Back in the sixties, Marshall McLuhan pronounced the world a global village. He was examining the effects on human consciousness of such technologies as television and radio, which allow us to know what’s going on in remote parts of the planet with amazing alacrity and speed. But McLuhan’s insight has been often misunderstood. To say that the world is a global village is not to say that all is cozy so that now we can simply get along. As in the local village, life in the global village is complex, messy, and hard—it’s other things as well, but it’s rarely lacking in difficulty and struggle. Nevertheless, we now live in a world of global consciousness, and I don’t think that genie is going back into the bottle. Our global consciousness has increased with the Internet and other digital technologies. We know too much about the many ways of being human around the planet to pretend that there can be a single standard for everyone in terms of race, sexuality, and gender role. I suspect as well that our interface with digital technologies is having subtler effects on consciousness as well, allowing us to feel the world in more fluid and inclusive terms than we could before.
But shifts in consciousness and history pretty much always produce a backlash, which I suspect is much of what enabled Donald Trump’s presidential victory. Given that the preponderance of his voters were whites without a college degree, I think it’s likely that many of his supporters feel left behind by history. There is no doubt some real pain there, but halting our progress is no adequate response. One Trump supporter I know qualified his position by specifying that he was not really for Trump, but rather against the people who oppose him. His fantasy—that’s my word—was that if Trump gets elected, this will force a reset of the whole political process. But I think that this position is at once too naïve and too cynical—naively cynical, if you will. On the one hand, there are far too many entrenched interests in the Washington system for a single leader, even the president (who is not, by the way, king or czar) to make the ways things happen go away. On the other hand, it’s not as if everyone in Washington is equally corrupt. Of course there’s corruption in politics—when hasn’t there been?—but there are other things there too. As Gloria Steinem said, the future is coming whether we like it or not. When I talk with my students, I see a future of devoted work for inclusiveness and social justice. There’s plenty to celebrate there.