2021: A retrospective

[jsburbidge]

 "The old year now away is fled,/The new year, it is entered": I am beginning to wonder whether 2021 may not end up being seen as a hinge year.

 

Personally, it has not been a particularly notable year either for good or bad. Work from home is essentially a non-issue, as most of my colleagues work in other countries and my interaction with them would be entirely online in any case. As an introvert, I feel little affected by the limitations on social interaction.

 

The one interesting marker of, perhaps, a lack of focus is books read. A number of years ago there was an interview early one year on CBC with somebody who had made the resolve to read one book a week.  The interviewer was fawning over this as a difficult task; my reaction was that, unless this was Ulysses or Tristram Shandy every week it was hardly worth noting. So I started keeping lists of books read per year. Over the past few years it has tended to run in the mid-seventies or over per year. This last year it was 56, a drop of almost twenty books - and that's in the absence of a compulsive tendency to waste time on news when Trump was president which had previously been a drag on my time.

 

This might be a question of what I read - looking back in detail, last year also has fewer books which I would rate very highly and more which I would rate as mediocre. It is certainly not competition with other media (I do not watch television and rarely stream video online). I put down some if it down to additional energy subsumed by working from home on tasks which I enjoy (and am therefore likely to spend extra hours working on which would not be available if I worked at the office). Some of it may be the absence of a commute in which I had daily time to read. But there is certainly a difference.

 

On the public stage, though, 2021 looks very much like the year which showed that the forms of representative democracy which have been used for the last century and a half, more or less, are failing to be effective in the face of crises such as COVID-19 or climate change.

 

The dominance of the short-term feedback from a relatively frequent electoral cycle over considered expert advice is becoming a critical issue.

 

It also begins to look as though the model we have (in which the assumption is that pressures will tend to moderate the views of successful political parties) may be valid only when a rising tide is lifting all boats  When there is a drumbeat of bad news combined with permanent insecurity recent experience suggests that the tendency is to create self-reinforcing cycles which drive parties away from consensus and towards polarization.

 

We certainly need the feedback from the general public as a check on government. Absent that, one gets arbitrary and autocratic rule which might be efficient and effective but is vastly more likely to be corrupt, inefficient, and driven by goals other than the public good. The question of how to get that level of feedback without the serious effects we can see from the predominance of short-term benefits over long-term ones is not easily resolved, and I have no answer.

 

Canada as a whole at least has a management crisis only (contemplate the Liberals for a moment), and one may hope that Ontario will give up on the PCs if they fail hard enough in the next few months of COVID management; the United States looks like it has a governance issue at the level of "on the edge of a civil war". The UK is heading down into some form of breakup of the Union accompanied by massive financial difficulties and severe restrictions on civil liberties (in England) for those who are not considered English enough. Europe shows governmental churn, internal tensions, and a momentum provided by its bureaucracy.

 

Socially, the culture wars continue to rage, but it looks as though majority sentiment is now firmly on the side of the new culture, even if that support's concentration in urban areas is a partial blocker on its political expression.

 

It was also a year full of wake-up calls on the climate front. (As also a year full of governments which have made general declarations of taking the issue seriously but are falling far short in practice.)

 

On the COVID side, people may be coming grudgingly to the acknowledgement that things will not return to all the old patterns (commercial, leisure, other activities). Expect the steady advance of the claim that internet access is a right like heat and water as remote access takes over as a norm for many things.

 

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TL;DR summary

 

Best book read in the year: The Ethical Poetic of the Later Middle Ages by Judson Allen (Interesting and informative. Unfortunately the author died young(ish) shortly after the book was published and produced no more work. I had met the author once or twice (during a stay in France) and it was edited by a friend (now also dead untimely); this did not bias my reading of it.)

 

Worst book read in the year: The Invention of Yesterday: A 50,000-Year History of Human Culture, Conflict, and Connection, by Tamim Ansary. (Really badly researched. I think I posted about this.)

 

Thing I missed most that I couldn't do due to COVID restrictions: go to Midnight Mass

 

Thing I missed least that I couldn't do due to COVID restrictions: commute

 

Best political news of the year: it continues to look as though the CPC is self-destructing as knives get pulled out because their new leader only increased their popular vote without actually winning the election.

 

Worst political news of the year: it looks as though the US Republicans are generally doubling down on being worse than Trump. (No, really, he gets booed when he tells them he's vaccinated.)

 

Summary of the year: Dryden's The Secular Masque ( https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44184/the-secular-masque )

Comments

[graydon]

I tend to think "management crisis" is a mis-characterisation; I agree it looks like one, but I think that while a lot of the people involved are competent managers, no degree of competence will save you from being determined to do the wrong thing. And that's the really sticky part; treating capital as income is the wrong thing to be doing even in strictly capitalistic terms.

[jsburbidge]

By "management crisis" I mean roughly "talk a good line, but get Fs on execution".

The actual managers involved may actually be more than competent, for all I know; at the actual government level the failure is in willingness to really act on what they know as a crisis. (Or on other matters: this weekend's Globe had an article listing a whole set of issues the Liberals have allowed to run without addressing (fighter jets, Huawei as a 5G provider, high-speed rail, etc.).)

This is in contrast to some other jurisdictions where it's fairly clear that a large part of the ruling groups don't (for ideological reasons) really recognize the existence of a crisis at all, and make no real pretence of taking it seriously (this applies to both COVID and climate change).

But yes, even COVID, which is the more minor challenge, requires substantial change in how things are done and what sorts of economic activities are successful (or even licit) and nobody wants to confront that.

[graydon]

I think we're in agreement on everything but nomenclature.

The Liberals are hamstrung by not wanting to upset anybody. There being no way to do a lot of important stuff without upsetting someone, the thing does not get done.

Nearly everything is hamstrung by an implicit "without upsetting the status quo in any fundamental way"; this is why hydrogen fuel cells can get public funding, but nothing which might work (methanol-air, alkaline fuel cells with ammonia, aluminium-air, or just really good batteries) does. The point is to not change things, rather than solving the problem.

I am now solidly of the view that necessary change will require a heads-on-stakes revolution, which is wretched. I figure the last moment we've got a chance of keeping industrial culture is when Thwaites goes, later this decade. (This is much more infuriating due to a perception that the first politician to really go "and the shape of the world is changed, let's get everybody into the future" will be at risk of deification.)