The kind of enlightened attitudes of tolerance and co-existence Noel Hodson and other correspondents are so impatient for are actually major human achievements that have only occasionally surfaced from the quagmire of history. Second-guessing the murk of oral tradition, we can speculate that over the last half a million years there have been instances, some perhaps lasting generations, of benign societies, enlightened leaders, humane mores. Certainly even the darkest periods will have seen wholly remarkable pockets of humanity living lives of light, and exceptional individuals transcending the pervasive savagery all around them. However, with only just over five thousand years of written records of any kind, and the early centuries of this eyeblink tied to agricultural civilizations, we have to make what we can of very limited recent solid evidence.
I have been thinking about reform and revolution as possibly different models for the way forward. We think we know the difference – reform is supposed to be gradual, incremental, mainly peaceful, while revolution is violent, decapitates the elite at the top, and nothing is the same again. Which seems to have the more lasting, permanent effect? Revolutions ? The English, French, Russian ? Any number of Mexican, and elsewhere? All involved the executions of heads of state and often their families amid a wider bloodbath. As to whether the basic meaning of the word, an overturning, occurred, the answer has to be yes and no. The English lasted without a monarch for just thirteen years, and then spent a century or more sorting out a state and church with typical English compromise, so the revolution was hardly a clean sweep. The Russians seemed to change everything, the entire economy and body politic, but didn't last long without the seizure of power by an absolute ruler preserving many of the nastier features of Tsarism, which in 2021 they still suffer today, even after many subsequent upheavals. The French had an absolute ruler back within ten years who eventually crowned himself emperor, and after his downfall alternated between monarchy of different flavours and various types of republic for the rest of the nineteenth and a large portion of the twentieth centuries. The French Revolution in particular is often cited as the beginning of the modern age after centuries of absolute monarchy, but try telling that to the inhabitants of France as described in Graham Robb's wonderful "The Discovery of France", who mostly would not have had a clue what you were talking about.
However, of course all that is not entirely fair. The French admire themselves for taking to the barricades in the cause of political change, rather than fudging along like the English, who have managed to hone hypocrisy and brinkmanship into the finest of arts and to muddle along without any awkward consistency such as a written constitution to get in the way of life and its contradictions. Anything close to real, direct democracy is a major achievement, and the various election systems in Europe, proportional representation et al., which can seem almost laughably complex, are precious islands of meticulous sanity compared with much of the rest of the world. There are ways of governing a country which don't really add up and are not supposed to. The French always have another republic up their sleeves just in case, and they like the Italians have been through periods when governments changed weekly and the civil servants quietly got on with the business. That can work quite well, but it isn't exactly democracy. In Spain they are still juggling the concept of the Spains, which have existed de facto since the fall of the Western Roman Empire, and much of the Green North still regards Madrid as a bandit lair. (I am making a point here, it's not just Catalonia. Less than a century ago the cry in Oviedo was "The Moors are coming!" as Franco's troops encircled that Asturian city.)
There is another large tome here I'll never get to write, and others do a much better job anyway, To get back to reform and revolution for this piece of commentary, I am trying to say that revolutions can be significant pieces of evidence and convenient markers to fix historical periods, but they usually leave many profound aspects and currents of national and international life only partially disturbed. Many lives may be disrupted or, sadly, ended, but the ships of state battle on through stormy seas. The way in which old patterns can reemerge are exemplified in the case of Reconstruction in the US – yes, slavery was abolished and it is almost impossible to overestimate the importance of acknowledging the complete humanity of people hitherto regarded as sub-human, but the white supremacists of the South managed to claw back their privilege so effectively that the fight for full equality is by no means over in the 21st. Century.
So I advocate for Reform, not Revolution . (And by the way, The Reformation turned out to be part-Revolution and part Reform, so that's another big subject for another time.) The main snag is how long real reform takes – the timescale is unconscionably long, especially now when there are so many pressures to speed up change. There is an urgent need for a new paradigm. I'll return to that in my next commentary.
