Note: This is a repost from my new blog, Politics and War. The original post is here. I am sharing it because I would like the Kos community's feedback. Comments/trackbacks to either are appreciated.
Remembrance of Things Past: The Danger of History
Jeremy has the first of what looks to be a landmark series of posts on the use of the term "fascist" in modern political discourse. He makes the most compelling argument I've seen for applying the term liberally. You should read the whole thing. If you don't, you're a fascist. (No, you're not.) But I want to add one thing to Jeremy's points.
N.B.: Prepare yourself for some decidedly gloomy analysis.
One of the biggest problems with sociopolitical discourse in the last century or so (this is actually a sort of arbitrary time frame) has been our hyper-awareness of our own history. Calm down,
Santayana, and let me explain.
An awareness of one's past, and one's roots, is of course vital. Indeed, it is a core tenet of classical liberalism that economic prosperity does not abrogate social responsibility, and it seems that preserving one's memory of pre-prosperity conditions is essential for this. What I'm referencing with the term "hyper-awareness of our own history" is the aesthetic belief, which seems to have been really popularized in American political discourse around the WWI era, that everything we do will be judged by history. This belief often leads to policies and widely-held normative values that place a premium not on the most prudent policies, but the ones that seem most likely to look good in history's reflection. In short, we have all given up on crafting policies that are wise or responsive to popular needs, and instead become professional nude models for Doris Kearns Goodwin's sketch sessions.
This aesthetic is absolutely incarnate in the Bush administration. They, more than anyone else, have promoted the idea that the sheer force of character can mold reality, and in doing so, have perpetuated the notion that well-crafted policies are absolutely secondary to the goal of projecting an aura of confidence. In a way, this hyper-awareness of history has forced us to an "end" of history. In his time, Roosevelt and Churchill gained acclaim for pursuing policies that they felt were right; today, our leaders gain acclaim by pursuing policies that Roosevelt and Churchill might have approved. The consequences of this are abjectly disastrous.
This phenomenon has led us to view history in paradigmatic terms. FDR is the ultimate leader; Bin Laden is the Platonic form of evil; the Holocaust was the absolute end-all-and-be-all of human cruelty. While these all may be valid claims, their absorption by a mass public places the lessons of Orwell directly in its crosshairs. The ultimate lesson of Orwell, who by his writing opposed himself directly to fascism, was that oppression has no single form. It cannot be personified. It is not a person or an event, but a philosophy that seeks to crush individualism and pursue power. The great accomplishment of "1984" was to give readers a vocabulary for speaking about oppression. Orwell's "Big Brother" was deliberately a vague entity because it was not an entity at all, but rather a concept, a common thread that could run through any element of society. He sought to provide humanity with the tools to call oppression by its name even in unfamiliar forms. He taught us to recognize Joe McCarthy, so to speak, even when he didn't look like Joe McCarthy.
Today, our knowledge of history has blunted this vital instinct. Instead of recognizing things like fascism and freedom by their material qualities, we recognize them by their historical referents. Fascism is not a way that people act, but rather something that Mussolini did. If something is dissimilar to Mussolini, it is deemed not to be fascism. Or, to use a more recent example: Torture is something that Saddam Hussein did. If we are not Saddam Hussein, then it is not torture. In this new, hyper-historicized view of society, ideas have no qualities save their association with historical names, places, and faces.
The danger of this kind of philosophy will be readily apparent to any student of the American revolution. To me, what has always been remarkable about the American revolution is not that the founders recognized the strength of their ideas, but that they recognized the fragility of their achievement. They embraced the deeply constructivist notion that their ideal system of government was not externally privileged over any other, and was certainly not the default mode of human society. Of course, they had an advantage. They had no historical referent for a massive, successful democracy. History's absence of precedent left them with no choice but to respond directly to the problems they faced. As a result, they were innovative, bold, and deeply non-ideological in the sense that they had no commitment except to what they deemed the most fair principle - "fairness," of course, being determined by nothing but their own common sense.
Today, we do have historical referents, and it has made us lazy. Our political leaders win approval not by persuading us to like their policies, but by persuading us that they are similar to something we already like. Descriptions of Bush's leadership as "Churchillian" entirely abrogate discourses on whether his leadership is, in actual fact, good or bad. Defenses of privatizing social security that appeal to a patriotic, pre-colonial notion of "freedom" sidestep completely the issue of whether these policies are wise or unwise.
In short, our overabundance of historical paradigms has destroyed any notion of responsiveness to the needs of the governed. When modern politicians play to the rolling cameras of history instead of the needs of the citizenry, they will inevitably fail to craft truly good policies, or to be judged by any meaningful standard when they do so. We have made a pact, with our leaders and with ourselves, to pretend that "freedom" only denotes similarity to the founders, "fascism" only denotes similarity to Mussolini, and "evil" only denotes similarity to Hitler. In doing so, we have surrendered our ability to judge ideas not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character. We strive eternally to restore the past, forgetting Lincoln's admonition about the rank inadequacy of its dogmas.
This, finally, may be the most treacherous consequence of our hyper-historical self-awareness: Pervasive dogmatism. While it persists, empiricism is impossible. The claim that one's policies or persona would have gotten FDR's stamp of approval is unfalsifiable and aesthetically invulnerable. But the worst consequence of this is not that it produces bad policy - although this is certainly the case - but that it produces a society unable to engage in democratic deliberation. The very foundation of a deliberative democracy, which is what the Constitution's enlightenment foundations strongly suggest that we are, is the idea that ideas are falsifiable and consensus is possible. The Millean ideal of a free market of ideas works if and only if the market works like any market, successfully separating wheat from chaff. Today, this system is gone. We have no mechanism for falsifying ideas, and thus no mechanism for dismissing them. The free market of ideas no longer produces winners or losers. It only produces conflict. When ideas are justified by their similarity to historical paradigms, believers who subscribe to those ideas on that basis become exactly that - believers, not thinkers.
We see it today in our schools, where an admittedly incomplete scientific theory is being replaced with an insipid, budget-store creationism. The worst consequence of this is not that schoolchildren will leave with a poorly-formed view on evolution; for the vast majority I know, a solid working knowledge of evolutionary theory will be inconsequential to their future endeavors. The worst consequence is that the theory of evolution will never be improved. Children who were once equipped to set aside their beliefs and reason with each other in contemporary terms will instead be committed to unfalsifiable "arguments" about which version of evolutionary theory places them on the right side of history.
We are raising a generation to believe, not to think. Instead of the theory of evolution, which could probably sustain humanity forever in its current form, imagine a world struggling to deal with a new threat, like a super-form of AIDS or a worldwide environmental disaster. (I refuse to admit terrorism or Islamic radicalism as "new" threats.) A half-century from now, when fate presents grown-up versions of our historically-aware, factually-unconscious children with a wholly unprecedented challenge, does anyone believe that they will be able to brush the cobwebs of past dogmas out of their eyes, and innovate effectively? No. They will be paralyzed. They will not have productive conversations. They will not think. They will not discover. They will die in a world whose intellectual progress has stagnated or regressed. They will die on a planet that is dying along with them. But they will die happily, because they will die on the right side of history. Even the ones who were on opposite sides.
All of this, incidentally, is one of the things that appeals most strongly to me about classical liberalism. Some have suggested, especially in critiquing Thomas Frank's work, that liberalism's emphasis on material gain is crass and ignores the importance of values. But liberals' empiricism and materialism are what save us from the urge to hyper-historicize our own existence. The constant updating of the basket of human needs to include not just good historical aesthetics, but also things like clean air, fair pay, and a social safety net - all simple, crass things - is what allows us to keep calling fascism by its name, even when it doesn't look like the fascism we've known before. Abandoning history, and defining the challenges of our day in our own time and manner, throws into sharp relief the failures of political leaders to meet them. This is liberalism's greatest strength: It allows us to stop striking cheap, vain poses for history's camera, and begin demanding real solutions, having productive dialogues, and condemning leaders who lobby for Churchill's vote instead of our own.
Today, with the ascendancy of modern conservatism, we have the precise opposite. The result of this force is an acute demosclerosis - a hardening of the arteries of democracy. It is stultifying. We have a president who urges us to crave heroes, and knows that he can gain our approval by appealing to our memory of heroes past. But we must no longer crave heroes. Let us instead crave wise men.