Directionless History - 2

“A storm is blowing in from Paradise… This storm is what we call progress.”

-         Walter Benjamin’s essay, “On the Concept of History”

As the liberal left and its ideology finds itself under assault in all the major democracies, Tim Carmody points out the problem of believing in a direction to history:

“It’s not a sudden eruption of chaos, but a manifestation of an ongoing vortex of chaos that stretches back indefinitely, without any unique origin. When we’re thrust into danger, in a flash we get a more truthful glimpse of history than the simple narratives that suffice in moments of safety.”

Carmody doesn’t mince words in pointing out who believes in a direction to history: it’s the defeated or oppressed ones. Heaven is (only) for the poor. Labour will overthrow its chains. You get the idea:

“The perfect theory that links events into beautiful chains of causality is elusive enough to be a dream for a fallen people.”

But the harsh reality?

“It’s all part of the storm; we’re all going to have to improvise.”

Ideally, we’d like a vision or a system that we can correct and adjust as we go along:

“It would be nice to have a political or religious framework in which all those things can be mended or redeemed.”

But most such frameworks become dogma, and hence resist all future change:

“There are a lot of people, on the left and the right, who share a version of this idea as a matter of dogma.”

And while many of these frameworks make sense when they are conceived, the tendency to cling to them long afterwards when they’re not working makes the framework a part of the problem, not the solution. As James Baldwin wrote:

“It protects our moral high-mindedness at the terrible expense of weakening our grasp of reality. People who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction, and anyone who insists on remaining in a state of innocence long after that innocence is dead turns himself into a monster.”

Why then do we keep coming up with new frameworks on how to make the world a better place? Like Sisyphus, perhaps we are doomed to keep trying something that won’t work, says Carmody:

“Even now, most of us are working to impose an order on the world, to see a plan at work, to sort the chaos into “distractions” and “reality,” whether it’s “real news,” uncovering the secret aims of an unseen puppet master, or articulating the one true politics that can Fix Everything. We can’t help it; it’s what we do.”