Facing Historical Vertigo?
(Photo by Robin Holland)
This week on the JOURNAL, Bill Moyers spoke with author Mike Davis for a socialist perspective on the world’s daunting economic situation. Davis referenced a column he wrote for TomDispatch.com likening today’s perspective on the crisis to when Europeans first saw the Grand Canyon. The column read:
“[One] expedition included a well-known German artist, but his sketch of the Canyon was wildly distorted, almost hysterical. [None of the early Europeans] could make sense of what they saw; they were simply overwhelmed by unexpected revelation. In a fundamental sense, they were blind because they lacked the concepts necessary to organize a coherent vision of an utterly new landscape... It took years of brilliant fieldwork to construct a conceptual framework for taking in the canyon... [before] it was finally possible for raw perception to be transformed into consistent vision... Like the Grand Canyon's first explorers, we are looking into an unprecedented abyss of economic and social turmoil that confounds our previous perceptions of historical risk. Our vertigo is intensified by our ignorance of the depth of the crisis or any sense of how far we might ultimately fall.”
What do you think?
