Making the future

“You can’t change history,” buddy tells me, as if that settles things once and for all.

It’s hard to know exactly what is meant by these words, which are most commonly uttered by guys who came through the 20th century pretty comfortably and would prefer that things continue along more or less the same. My uncharitable interpretation is that it’s a sage-sounding way of saying that one doesn’t give a damn. It’s a rejection of empathy – a quasi-philosophical “I’m alright Jack.”

But that’s not entirely fair. Perhaps it’s more an expression of not wanting to feel guilty about things beyond one’s control – including the wrongs of previous generations, and the inheritance of certain unfair advantages. This is reasonable. We should feel neither guilt nor pride in our ancestry – but we can choose how to proceed from here.

“What’s past is past,” people say. Or maybe they’re really saying, “What’s passed is passed,” which is more of a scatological view of history.

In front of the National Archives Building in Washington, D.C., there’s a monument inscribed with the words, “What’s past is prologue,” which is presumably meant to suggest that events will continue to unfold naturally or logically from what went before – although this quote from Shakespeare’s The Tempest seems a strange choice, since it refers to the plotting of a murder.

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Citizens of the U.K. were recently forced to reinterpret their history when it was revealed that the national treasury had just paid off a debt that was incurred to implement the 1833 Slavery Abolition Act. Reparations were paid not to the freed slaves, but to their “owners” – effectively legitimizing the institution that was being banned.

Britain had previously outlawed slave trading, and had banned the practice of slavery in the Mother Country, but there was considerable resistance to abolishing it across the Empire – since it was still the basis for lucrative colonial plantations in the Caribbean, Mauritius, and in what is now South Africa. The new legislation was opposed not just by MPs who had a stake in those enterprises, but also by some who made highly principled arguments about the sanctity of private property. So the solution was a compensation package valued at £20 million. (According to The Independent, that’s equivalent to about £16.5 billion today – which is $28 billion, based on the feeble condition of our Canadian currency this spring.)

It was a massive transfer of wealth – mostly to the already-wealthy. Payments were made to some 3,000 families, boosting business and political dynasties that have succeeded to this day. The enslaved, for their part, were not immediately emancipated, but were required to continue providing free labour during a transition period that was referred to as “apprenticeship.” (This post-slavery enslavement was originally supposed to last for 12 years, but it was shortened to four years.)

To pay for this human buyback program, the government negotiated with a couple of esteemed London bankers, securing a £15 million loan. That was in 1835 – and the debt was not paid off until 2015. For British citizens today – including many whose ancestors were enslaved – it has been hard to come to terms with the fact that they were, until very recently, forking over their tax money to finance this purchase. (I wonder if anyone has crunched the numbers to find out how much interest was paid during those 180 years.)

“It was a different time,” people say. And yes, all the great nations partook in the slave economy – notably Spain, Portugal, Holland, France, and Denmark. But even back then, there were abolitionists calling for change. In Britain, the Quakers had been actively campaigning against slavery for half a century. Some warned that the big payoff would leave a stubborn moral stain upon the nation, but pragmatism won out in the end – the ethical rendered transactional.

You can’t change historical events, but you have to constantly reappraise their meaning. In this instance, we might reflect on the meaning of debt, the role of financial institutions in our society, and the legitimacy of capital.

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Whether we are nearing the end or still smack-dab in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic, we are already beginning to appraise its meaning. Many of us want to know whether the government is responding appropriately, but it will be some time before we can make any kind of assessment.

It didn’t take long for people to see parallels with the Spanish flu outbreak of 1918-1919, which is thought to have killed between 20 million and 50 million people globally. That strain of H1N1 was brought to Canada by soldiers returning from overseas service in the First World War – and also by people working in the commercial fishery, travelling between Massachusetts and southwestern Nova Scotia. It killed about 2,200 people in Nova Scotia – more than the Halifax Explosion of 1917.

Nonetheless, Nova Scotia is generally given a historical thumbs-up for its timely response. There were unprecedented restrictions on personal liberties – mirroring the measures put in place this spring. Many historians credit the mayor of Halifax, Dr. Arthur C. Hawkins – who had served as coroner for Halifax County, and later as medical officer with the Immigration Branch of the Department of the Interior – for getting it right.

Boston was hit hard, and Nova Scotia sent doctors and nurses there to help – likely as a gesture of reciprocity for aid sent to Halifax following the Explosion. This gave Nova Scotia a heads-up about the seriousness of the coming pandemic. Hawkins heeded the advice of doctors who had observed the devastation of Spanish flu in Boston – and as a result, Nova Scotia was the first province to implement restrictions on public gatherings. Though it was the first province to be affected by the flu, it ultimately had the lowest mortality rates.

Naturally, some people blamed the disease on modernity itself – a crazy age of urbanization, unfettered trade and travel, and geopolitical entanglements. (Sound familiar?) There were rumours, conspiracy theories, and false cures. Flu anxiety proved useful in the marketing of pasteurized milk, based on claims that had no scientific validity – although pasteurization did help put a stop to the spread of tuberculosis.

Spanish flu pushed us to develop better public health services, including the coordination of efforts at the federal, provincial, and local levels. It taught us much about the value of accurate and timely information, clear communication, and transparency. In these respects, we are right to hold our government to a high standard. Today, as in 1918-1919, there are some swaggering complaints about the “nanny state” impinging on our freedoms – but this is largely a failure of empathy, because we know that disease tends to have the most severe effects on disadvantaged groups.

First Nations, for example, were hit hard by Spanish flu – an echo of the various epidemics that had reduced their numbers dramatically during the previous few centuries. Some historians have hypothesized that there were tens of millions of people living in the Americas before European contact, and that as much as 95 percent of this population was quickly wiped out by diseases that arrived with the first Europeans. It is thought that many indigenous societies had already been vastly diminished by the time white settlers began arriving in considerable numbers – leading to false assumptions about their culture, and fostering a mythology of the New World as a largely uninhabited wilderness that was freely available for exploitation.

Many of us find the past to be a bit of a downer. I think we should find it invigorating. We can’t change what happened, but we can seek a better understanding of why events unfolded as they did, so we can move forward with a little more wisdom.

Moving toward COVID recovery, there is pressure to get things back to exactly the way they were before. This is an utterly crazy notion, because we know that we were, in some respects, on the wrong course. No industry should be automatically entitled to its share of the vast sums of public money being spent. If we choose, we can begin to address economic inequality, we can develop local food systems that bring prosperity to rural communities, we can construct better housing for the young and the old, we can build low-carbon transportation infrastructure, and we can make a broader shift to renewable energy.

There’s a lot of talk right now about “re-starting our economy,” which is an apt description, because the economy is not a natural, organic entity. It is a machine that we have built; we have the power to modify and control it to achieve our objectives. The future does not just happen – we create it. DL