Progressive
“You” a very progressive person once
told me “are not a progressive”! I suppose this is true if by progressive one
means someone who has a grasp on the shape of the future and is busily working
to bring it into existence. I don’t have any grasp on the future though if I
were to guess I would say that following the convulsions we are likely to go
through our social attitudes and practices will almost certainly be radically
transformed. This is as likely to be ‘regress’ as anything else. We may become,
in some ways, harder, crueler and more intolerant (than we are even now!) as we
focus more and more on the basics of subsistence. We might, at the same time,
become more generous and community minded towards those in the in-group yet
correspondingly more suspicious and resentful of the outsider. Neo-liberal
precarity gives us a glimpse of this in the resentful populist and I can’t see
general breakdown producing anything but an intensification of this spirit. As
scientific and educational infrastructure crumbles I have little doubt that
things like magic, sacrifice and taboo will make roaring comebacks and that
exhausted and effete Christian churches will pull off no second Carolingian
renaissance. We can already see in the Q cult (obsessed as it is with child
sacrifice) the shape of future religion even if it retains the external name of
Christian. So, I suppose being not bullish about ‘progress’ in terms of the
human future I am to that extent not very ‘progressive’.
Really, though, the nub of the accusation
is my support, or perceived lack thereof, for what Lyotard called the ‘emancipatory’
meta-narrative. I am, in spite of what the individual cited above claims,
largely in favor of the emancipatory meta-narrative. Or I should say in favor
of it to the extent that it can be realized without self-contradiction. The
question, as even Burke held, is not how much constraint we can impose but how
much liberty we can permit. Now, of course, Burke was not a progressive exactly
and the very fact that I have cited him shows that I am not exactly one either.
The emancipatory narrative looks resolutely forward and I, like Lot’s wife,
have looked back to a thinker who opposed the French Revolution (a key moment
in that narrative- at least for some).
Burke, in other words, backed the wrong side which is how you get
written out of the story of freedom no matter what you might have actually
contributed to it. In other words, the emancipatory narrative cuts across the
historical narrative and the historical truth of any figure is something I very
much look for. Historical truth is something I should distinguish from the empirical
science of history. I should probably say, instead of ‘historical truth’
something like the ‘historicity of both truth and praxis’ as one can be a
superb ‘historian’ in the academic sense without having a ‘historical’ bone in
one’s body. What is more, ‘historicist’ as I may be, I am not a historian and
do not have the special kind of patience and attention to detail to be one. A
historicist is someone who resists the emancipatory narrative not as a project
for the future but as the key to unlocking the past. A historicist is someone
who resists what Hubert Butterfield labels ‘Whig history’.
Whig history orders and arranges past
phenomena as they anticipate or fail to anticipate the present. Butterfield’s
complaint was that such a lens erased the pastness of the past and rendered it
only a diminished version of the present. This produced, in his mind, many
distorted pictures of things like the scientific revolution where figures were
evaluated and judged solely according to the values of the historian, who was
usually looking for some hero who anticipated current science and some villain,
some superstitious fool or pedant, who did not. Thus, William Harvey is
elevated to a hero of science while Robert Fludd is condemned as a mere
magician though Fludd was an early supporter of Harvey’s theories and may have
influenced them. I have rarely met a devotee of the emancipatory meta-narrative
who was not subtly or not so subtly a Whig historian. History is the history of
freedom as Hegel said though Hegel, perhaps, now belongs to the dark shadows of
the past and is no more to be cited than Edmund Burke! Hegel, of course, understood
that the achievements of freedom were always limited and precarious and would
agree that the American, French, and other more recent revolutions have left an
ambiguous legacy.
I, though, encounter some people for
whom freedom is an all or nothing affair and who think that these past
revolutions were no revolutions at all. That or one of them WAS the real
revolution and must be whitewashed and justified at literally ANY cost to intellectual
or moral integrity! Perhaps this is a distortion imposed by being North
American for in North America, and the United States in particular, the
emancipatory meta-narrative has mated with what Lyotard would call a
prescriptive language game: that of puritan moralism. I have examined this
elsewhere but for puritan moralism history is the not the story of freedom but
of un-freedom.[1] It
is not the story of where the spirit moves but of where it doesn’t. In other
words, history becomes the history of evil and we pursue the history of evil
because by locating and denouncing it we wash ourselves of its taint. As in the
Manichean religion (of which puritan moralism is a species- everything reduces
to a theology of some sort) we become good by a ritual separation from the bad and
this separation is effected by a ‘critique’ of the past governed by a general hermeneutic
of suspicion. The past then becomes a sort of scapegoat that bears the sins of
the present.
I don’t play this game at all and I
don’t play it for exactly the reason Blake said: the abstract moralism of good
and evil crushes the minute particulars of existence. In this case, the
particulars crushed are those of the lived imperfection of human existence from
which the self-identity of ‘good’ supposedly releases us. This lived imperfection
includes tragedy understood as the Greeks (sorry to bring them up again)
understood it: human beings do not simply fail by being villains, though in
every age there are plenty of those. They also fail by being virtuous: the
identity of the good principle with itself does not free us of evil. Our
virtue, in tragedy, is our greatest temptation and leads into a ‘sin’ and a
tragic fall. This is how we experience the limits of our condition: by tragic
suffering. This is how we also learn the limits of the historical horizons we
operate under, even the horizon of emancipatory progress, which has fathered as
many crimes as simple villainy has and possibly worse ones too. Progress does
not free us from tragic suffering and never will. We will always face, as Eliot
says, the painful fact of “things done to other’s harm” which once we took for
“exercise of virtue”. Thus, ‘progress’ is selling us an illusion if it promises
catharsis and liberation from the taint of failure, scandal and sin. This is
because we act under the same limitations as agents in the past which is one
way in which ‘historicity’ determines our existence. Moralism will never wash
us of our sins or release us from the finitude of time and space. It is only
through time and process that we learn the tragic limits of our horizons and
that we were told very early in the day by Anaximander in his famous fragment!
It is my considered opinion, from a longstanding
habit of reading, that people in the past understood this rather better than we
do even if in other ways their vision of the world was much more limited. This
is why we should read them not in light of the emancipatory narrative but for
themselves. This way we learn the tragic narrative which is one Lyotard does
not really consider as far as I can make out. Without the tragic narrative the
emancipatory narrative will not emancipate anything but aggressive moralizing
and terroristic levelling. Plus, you will not learn the tragic narrative from
any other source than the tragedians many of whom are Greek, Hebrew and
medieval people who smell bad and have bad teeth. There is no place to go to
see the contingency of the present but the pastness of the past for that is the
place we can see it not in ourselves. A fish cannot see water but we, being a
bit better than fish, can do so, as it were, in a mirror: the mirror memory,
personal and cultural, gives us. We
should take full advantage.
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