Back from the Future

On a recent podcast I made some comments about progress and progressivism. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pdjtv5wD-fM&t=168s) These concerned my doubts and hesitations concerning whether ‘progress’ was really so good a framing for understanding things like social justice or equity. After all, cultures that do not frame time in the linear western fashion are as capable of striving for justice as we are. That there are different concepts of time is something I learned a long while ago when, as a teenager, I read what might have been the first serious book from which I learned something. This was Cosmos and History by Mircea Eliade. From this book I learned about the figuration of time as cyclical. Rather than a linear progression from point A to point B time was, in many non-western cultures, figured as returning or reverting on itself in a repeating pattern. This contrasts with at least two other figurations, absolute return (as to a golden age) and eschatology or the projection of an absolute, unconditioned future. Sometimes these latter two may combine as in certain symbols in the Bible; the unconditioned future may be assimilated to the return to Eden. A rather more typical view, embodied the notion of a felix culpa or happy fall, projects the end as MORE than the beginning as, say, having passed to consciousness through the moment of negation or evil.

Still, one thing struck me about the conclusion of this book. When constructed as a world immanent process the notion of eschatology had disturbing moral implications. It implied, for instance, that the lives and sufferings of the overwhelming majority of humans were merely instrumental to the happiness of the lucky few who would enjoy a brief mortal existence in the ‘crystal palace’ of reason and enlightenment. This seems as shaky a ‘theodicy’ as there is; are the sufferings of children in the industrial revolution really compensated by my last comfortable sip of coffee? In ‘benighted’ antiquity this was not a concern in quite the same way. Eliade pointed out that in the rituals surrounding dying gods like Adnonis or Thammuz individual suffering was assimilated to the divine drama of death and rebirth. Human suffering was not reduced and instrumentalized but inscribed in the divine world itself and was even a mode of entering that world. This transmutation of suffering into divinization of course survived in the Christian dispensation and even reached its apex there. Still, if my readers are thinking of challenges to linear projections of time they are more likely to be thinking of Nietzsche. Nietzsche rejected a world in which life was lived backwards in an idealized past or forwards in an idealized future. Life is now and this now is the now of eternal recurrence. This moment I am now in must be embraced in heroic resolution in all its terror for it will recur endlessly. There is no yes I can say to life that is not yes to the moment I am in for that is absolute. I’m not sure what heroic resolution a slave on a slave ship is supposed to summon towards the eternal recurrence of his chains but I DO think this idea has some merit. I think it is possible to live un-reflectively in the future and un-reflectively in the past in ways that instumentalize the present and alienate us from it.

In my last piece I talked about how visions of the future distort our understanding of the present through myths that encode various kinds of violence whether ecocidal or genocidal. There are theories like ‘effective altruism’ that literally demand cruelty in the present in the name of ‘kindness’ to the future. Plans (that squander time and money) are drawn up that gamble on the possibility that in ‘5 to 10 years’ we will solve complex problems like colonizing Mars or mining asteroids because, of course, humans are apex problem solvers. This kind of projection is dazzling but deadly because it precludes any serious confrontation with our limits. Health, peace and prosperity go up and down. In the coming decades they may well go down. Confronting this fact involves finding meaning and purpose in our lives not pegged to utopian promises of more and better. It involves, as the ancient Stoics knew, confronting the power of contingency or as they would call it fortune. Fortune is something the good man or woman is above and the goodness and beauty of life is not contingent on a crazy run of cosmic luck. The worth of a human life is not based whether a person has good or bad luck but how one is in the midst of good or bad luck. In fact, this necessary self-confrontation (I am not the privileged golden child of the universe) entails a certain amount of contingency and a certain amount of suffering. If I may be blunt for a moment, it is time to dust off Epictetus rather than gamble on access to other planets and their resources saving our bacon as a species.