Community

HalMaclean wrote:

Glad you liked the article.

I find the notion of history as a repeating cycle of generations very hopeful myself. It means things will get better.

And you're right in the sense that technology has made our lives better. I'd rather be alive now than in any of the golden ages of the past. But, I do think we are in the final days of an era of institutional decay and, if that part of the theory holds true, I worry about what comes next. The last time was the Roaring 20s, and we all know where that led...

The "Roaring 20s" are remembered as a huge depression in Europe and Canada, many writers at the time refering to it as the "Age of Anxiety." America was the anomaly at the time. When the Great Depression came, it was really just "more of the same" for Europe.

You also have to remember that, in the early 20th century, the U.S. was not the economic engine of the world that it later became. So there shouldn't be much cause to believe that anything the U.S. did "caused" the Great Depression, as that depression was an international phenomenon...we just managed to avoid it in the 1920s even as it was smacking Europe around. The U.S. "Roaring 20s" probably were not a good idea in that our post-war isolationism caused us to lose sight of the global economy, believing ourselves to be self-contained. Probably the "irrational exuberance" got a little out of hand, and more prudent economic behavior could have softened the blow the the depression that followed.

From a zeitgeist perspective, the 1920s were awful. The Russians, after pulling out of WWI due to the Bolshevik revolution, had in addition to its civil war a separate war with Poland. Then the Soviet Union formed, Lenin dies, and Stalin seized control...and there was not so much rejoicing. The Germans suffered through hyperinflation, massive debt and unemployment and the rise of Nazism.

More culturally you have expressions like TS Eliot's The Waste Land (1922):

April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land.

...

And I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you:
I will show you fear in a handful of dust.

...

That corpse you planted last year in your garden,
Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year?

Etc.

James Joyce published Ulysses, and it was almost immediately banned in the UK and U.S until the 30's. Similarly D.H. Lawrence was being constantly prosecuted for obscenity. Kafka's The Trial was published, about a man, Josef K., arrested, tried by a bureaucratic regime and executed by stabbing for an unspecified crime. Josef K.'s final moments cvreating a certain impression:

But the hands of one of the gentleman were laid on K.'s throat, while the other pushed the knife deep into his heart and twisted it there, twice. As his eyesight failed, K. saw the two gentlemen cheek by cheek, close in front of his face, watching the result. "Like a dog!" he said, it was as if the shame of it should outlive him.

The Dadaists rose up, most specifically agreeing that they had no faith in their culture, a group of them co-writing the following as a description of their art:

No more painters, no more writers, no more musicians, no more sculptors, no more religions, no more republicans, no more royalists, no more imperialists, no more anarchists, no more socialists, no more Bolsheviks, no more politicians, no more proletarians, no more democrats, no more armies, no more police, no more nations, no more of these idiocies, no more, no more, NOTHING, NOTHING, NOTHING.

Thus we hope that the novelty which will be the same thing as what we no longer want will come into being less rotten, less immediately GROTESQUE.

I think the seeds of the Great Depression were there, in the zeitgeist of the Roaring 20s. :D

fodigg wrote:

Panda brings up a great point. When doing a "timeline" of zeitgeists, have a general map of the world already made. Draw out the "center" of each zeitgeist and determine how far reaching it is. Mark any areas that don't follow or actively appose the zeitgeist.

Maybe you'll have two different zeitgeists "centered" in different areas. What is the world like when they overlap?

Interesting stuff.

I was thinking about the possibility of racial zeitgeists, like how fantasy texts will often talk about "The Age of Men" or "The Age of Elves," and so on. So I started thinking about the Dragonborn Empire and the Tiefling empire. Say the Dragonborn empire was coterminous with an Age of Blood, and the Tiefling empire was coterminous with an Age of Decay. When the two began to overlap, it created a threshold era that the two empires fought viciously to control. You could even say the area where the zeitgeists overlapped was a seperate Age of War. When the threshold era expired, neither side had been able to win, so they both lost, creating an Age of Chaos in which both empires crumbled. If one side had won, their zeitgeist would have dominated the area for the next age. If they had been able to reach some kind of detente, it might have created an Age of Tyranny for anyone who wasn't a Tiefling or Dragonborn as the two empires used them as proxies. As a long shot, they might have even created an Age of Light if they had managed to peacefully resolve their differences.

Pandaemoni wrote:

The "Roaring 20s" are remembered as a huge depression in Europe and Canada, many writers at the time refering to it as the "Age of Anxiety." America was the anomaly at the time. When the Great Depression came, it was really just "more of the same" for Europe.

You also have to remember that, in the early 20th century, the U.S. was not the economic engine of the world that it later became. So there shouldn't be much cause to believe that anything the U.S. did "caused" the Great Depression, as that depression was an international phenomenon...we just managed to avoid it in the 1920s even as it was smacking Europe around. The U.S. "Roaring 20s" probably were not a good idea in that our post-war isolationism caused us to lose sight of the global economy, believing ourselves to be self-contained. Probably the "irrational exuberance" got a little out of hand, and more prudent economic behavior could have softened the blow the the depression that followed.

:D

Also remember, that we (USA) were pretty much the only country without a long-established Central Bank at the time, and that after the Federal Reserve Act was passed, and the economy 'boomed' for a bit, the bankers responsible for that act then called in all the loans and CAUSED the Great Depression in order to consolodate power/buy up corporations/properties. This is happening now in the real estate market!