Politics of Inevitability or Eternity?

[Vouthon]

Do you like your history linear or cyclical?

In his recent book, The Road to Unfreedom (2018), the Yale University Professor Timothy Snyder - a specialist on central and Eastern European history - drew a distinction between two allegedly competing worldviews: the politics of inevitability and the politics of eternity.

People falling into the first category (the inevitable) espouse the view that, while the past is undeniably complicated, bloody and chaotic, we are nonetheless "inching inexorably toward a freer, safer, more progressive world". It is underpinned by the confident assumption that there are "no alternatives" to a single, grand idea which represents "the end of history". This is more than a mere hope: it is a secular faith.

Good examples of inevitability politics would be the optimism of the USA in 1991 (after the fall of Communism) in the inevitable triumph of market economics, individual human rights and open, democratic societies. Another would be that of the Soviet Union, in its heyday, buoyed by its belief in the inevitability of global proletarian revolution and resulting post-capitalist, classless society.

I think we can see the evident pitfalls of this paradigm. No grand narratives like that are ever grounded in reality. They blind people to the ever-present trap of falling back into the kind of things you claim can't possibly happen. Liberal capitalism had its reckoning, in this respect, after the 2008 financial crisis, when ballooning disparities in income undermined "faith" in the goodness and inevitable rise in living standards heralded by free-marketers. Marxism-Leninism was, likewise, irreparably damaged by the revolutions of 1989-1991 which saw nearly every Communist regime of note (except in China and a few other remote hold-outs) consigned to the dustbin of history.

I would also, albeit with po-faced reluctance, have to include my beloved European Union (#BFF) in this category, with "ever-closer union" counting as its grand narrative while the Eurozone sovereign debt crisis and/or the spread of populism in the member states could be viewed as its existential moment of "reckoning".

Which is where the politics of eternity comes in. This worldview conceptualizes history as a tragic, cyclical phenomenon, as tied to past nostalgia as the politics of inevitability is to future optimism. According to Snyder, eternity politics "places one nation at the centre of a cyclical story of victimhood. Time is no longer a line into the future, but a circle that endlessly returns the same threats from the past." These politicians are often obsessed with restoring past greatness and promote a siege-mentality against supposedly perennial threats. See:

It is concerned with the past, but in a self-absorbed way, free of any real concerns with facts. Its mood is a longing for past moments that never really happened during epochs that were, in fact, disastrous. Eternity politicians bring us the past as a vast misty courtyard if illegible monuments to national victimhood, all of them equally distant from the present, all of them equally accessible for manipulation. Every reference to the past seems to involve an attack by some external enemy upon the purity of the nation.” ​

― Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century
​

Paradigmatic examples of countries in the grip of eternity politics would be Vladimir Putin's "postmodernist dictatorship" in Russia, Viktor Orban's "illiberal democracy" in Hungary, Brexshiit (sorry, cough) Brexit Britain's "merry Little England" and Donald Trump's "America First" United States.

Do you consider Synder's two paradigms to be useful or (alternately) crude and reductionist in scope?

If you think they are useful, then how might we inoculate ourselves against both the naive but dogmatic utopianism of inevitability politics and the xenophobic, backward-looking nihilism of eternity politics?

 

[Estro Felino]

If you think they are useful, then how might we inoculate ourselves against both the naive, dogmatic politics of inevitability and the xenophobic, backward-looking nihilism of eternity politics?

I do agree with such distinction and the answer is very clear. Europe's history shows that the anthropological success of the European civilization, as for scientific progress, law, art and culture is exclusively due to the adoption of "eternity politics" and this is excellently explained by Fichte, when he says that Germans have succeeded in maintaining their ethnic and cultural purity, against external threats.

The concept of victimhood is real and not fictional. It was real, when Fichte complained about Napoleon, and it is real now.

You define Putin as a post-modernist dictator. The definition may be appropriate...but I guess that it's inevitable that Russians are blindly devoted to a person who has vowed to restore the Russian Volksgeist, because what Stalinism did was a depersonalization of what Russia is and what it stands for, anthropologically, linguistically, and spiritually.

I particularly love the definition "politics of inevitability" because I believe that's what modern economists try to inculcate...if you think of Economics books written by Begg, Fischer, commonly used in Italian law schools.

For example...they try to inculcate that the Central Banks must be inevitably private and independent; or that devaluation of a currency is negative.

 

[Augustus]

Do you like your history linear or cyclical?

It's not a question of like, but of what is and it certainly isn't linear.

In his recent book, The Road to Unfreedom (2018), the Yale University Professor Timothy Snyder - a specialist on central and Eastern European history - drew a distinction between two allegedly competing worldviews: the politics of inevitability and the politics of eternity....
It is concerned with the past, but in a self-absorbed way, free of any real concerns with facts. Its mood is a longing for past moments that never really happened during epochs that were, in fact, disastrous. Eternity politicians bring us the past as a vast misty courtyard if illegible monuments to national victimhood, all of them equally distant from the present, all of them equally accessible for manipulation. Every reference to the past seems to involve an attack by some external enemy upon the purity of the nation.”
Do you consider Synder's two paradigms to be useful or (alternately) crude and reductionist in scope?

As an atheist I can't buy into the linear teleology of Divine Providence promoted by many monotheists and Rationalists, but I also cannot agree with this categorisation of a cyclical view of history.

So I subscribe to the tragic/cyclical view, but don't consider Snyder's conceptualisation to even remotely resemble the classical sense of the tragic.

History is cyclical because we, as a species, are prone to hubris (such as that of the inevitabalists). Human society is tragic because of our inability to learn from our mistakes and redeem our flaws.

John Maynard Keynes summed it up well when discussing his good friend Bertrand Russell:

“Bertie held two ludicrously incompatible beliefs: on the one hand he believed that all the problems of the world stemmed from conducting human affairs in a most irrational way; on the other hand that the solution was simple, since all we had to do was to behave rationally.”

Also rearticulated by John Gray:

The fact that rational humanity shows no sign of ever arriving only makes humanists cling more fervently to the conviction that humankind will someday be redeemed from unreason. Like believers in flying saucers, they interpret the non-event as confirming their faith... Science is a solvent of illusion, and among the illusions it dissolves are those of humanism. Human knowledge increases, while human irrationality stays the same. Scientific inquiry may be an embodiment of reason, but what such inquiry demonstrates is that humans are not rational animals. The fact that humanists refuse to accept the demonstration only confirms its truth.

John Gray, The Silence of Animals: On Progress and Other Modern Myths

 

[Vouthon]

It's not a question of like, but of what is and it certainly isn't linear.

Granted, I was being deliberately flippant and tongue-in-cheek with that question.

As an atheist I can't buy into the linear teleology of Divine Providence promoted by many monotheists and Rationalists, but I also cannot agree with this categorisation of a cyclical view of history.

Interestingly, it was the theological fashion of medieval theologians to combine a teleological belief in progressive development of doctrine (and the myth of a future period of peace for the Church and world, most recently popularised for lay consumption through the Fatima apparitions) with an intellectual trend known by the name typology, which advocated a cyclical and semi-tragic understanding of Christian history, as a grand re-enactment of 'types' foreshadowed in the Old Testament people of Israel.

The Collations on the Hexaemeron were a series of sermons delivered to the Franciscan community at Paris in the Spring of 1273 by St. Bonaventure, the Seraphic Doctor.

In these lectures, St. Bonaventure theorized that the grand, overarching meaning of history - the ‘divine plan,’ so to speak - was hidden within the text of the Hexaemeron, the Genesis account of the six days of creation. This concept holds that concordances exist in which precise historical parallels can be worked out among the seven ages of each Testament, the Old and the New. In other words, if we look at the history of the Israelites in the Old Covenant, we can anticipate foreshadowings of different epochs in the history of the Church, whereby Christians will repeat the mistakes and successes of Israelite history.

From this theoretical foundation, St. Bonaventure formulated a “theology of history” in which there are Seven Ages of the Church, mirroring what he believed had been Seven Ages in the life of the Old Testament Jews. But he balanced this out with a progressive conviction that our understanding of revelation - morality, knowledge, God's will - progresses with time, in a linear unidirectional way even through times of cyclical collapse i.e.

General Audience of 10 March 2010: Saint Bonaventure (2) | BENEDICT XVI

St Bonaventure rejected the idea of the Trinitarian rhythm of history. God is one for all history and is not tritheistic. Hence history is one, even if it is a journey and, according to St Bonaventure, a journey of progress.​

This does not mean that the Church is stationary, fixed in the past, or that there can be no newness within her. "Opera Christi non deficiunt, sed proficiunt": Christ's works do not go backwards, they do not fail but progress, the Saint said in his letter De Tribus Quaestionibus. Thus St Bonaventure explicitly formulates the idea of progress. For St Bonaventure Christ was no longer the end of history, as he was for the Fathers of the Church, but rather its centre; history does not end with Christ but begins a new period.

The following is another consequence: until that moment the idea that the Fathers of the Church were the absolute summit of theology predominated, all successive generations could only be their disciples. St Bonaventure also recognized the Fathers as teachers for ever, but the phenomenon of St Francis assured him that the riches of Christ's word are inexhaustible and that new light could also appear to the new generations. The oneness of Christ also guarantees newness and renewal in all the periods of history.​

So he was still very much a progressive theorist, albeit more moderate than Joachim.

This was very, very popular in medieval apocalyptic thought. The naive, linear utopian "three ages" of Joachim of Fiore was ultimately spurned as heretical. But this Bonaventurian "typological" version of the teleological myth was given the seal of orthodoxy.

The same was the case for another medieval Doctor of the Church, the 12th century St. Hildegard of Bingen:


Fides Quaerens Intellectum: The Pope and the Prophetess: Benedict XVI, Hildegard of Bingen, and the Reform of the Church (Part 2)

this last vision explodes with prophetic power into Hildegard’s final and most detailed treatment of the “times to come” (futurorum temporum, as her redactor, Gebeno von Eberbach, would call them half-a-century later). The cycles between pessimistic corruption and optimistic reform grow sharper and more radical—the crises deeper, the renewals more holy. The key to understanding these cycles lies in Hildegard’s symbolist mode of thinking: the history of the Church after Christ recapitulates not just thematically but sacramentally, as it were, the history of the Church, Israel, the people of God, as told in Scripture. Thus, “the dialectical triad of building up, falling away, and restoration” is a key historical principal, not only foreshadowed but foreordained, as it were, in the process of Creation, Fall, and Redemption at the heart of salvation history.[8]

This schema is to be found in the history of the Church: Creation corresponds to the foundation of the apostolic Church, while the Fall of original sin can be seen in the “womanly time” of corruption Hildegard sees all around her. In the Augustinian conception of salvation history, this triadic schema in the time of the Church takes place in each individual soul as it journeys, a pilgrim in this world, towards the restoration of its true home in the Heavenly City. Hildegard’s innovation is to see this triad reflected in the macrocosmic history of the world, as well. Although the final, complete restoration—the conclusion of the triadic cycles—will only come at the end of the world, in the Parousia and New Jerusalem, there is nevertheless the possibility for this process of establishment, crisis, and resolution to be repeated and renewed in the course of history. These cycles are the most prominent feature of Hildegard’s vision of the end times, intricately developed and refined in the Liber Divinorum Operum
​

History is cyclical because we, as a species, are prone to hubris (such as that of the inevitabalists). Human society is tragic because of our inability to learn from our mistakes and redeem our flaws.

The Catholic stance would be that perfectability is impossible in our temporal world bondaged to sin. Nonetheless, we believe that the hope for "a stable peace and tranquility" in international affairs emanating from an enhanced awareness of "the link that binds humanity together, and thus many conflicts will be either prevented entirely or at least their bitterness will be diminished" (Pope Pius XI, 1925 Encyclical, Quas Primas) is not a meaningless endeavour, even though our efforts are bound to be limited, and temporary. To strive for a "better" world is not the same as dreaming of a "perfect world".

Consider this from the Vatican II constitution Gaudium et Spes:


Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern Word-Gaudium et Spes

"...Peace results from that order structured into human society by its divine Founder, and actualized by men as they thirst after ever greater justice. The common good of humanity finds its ultimate meaning in the eternal law. But since the concrete demands of this common good are constantly changing as time goes on, peace is never attained once and for all, but must be built up ceaselessly. Moreover, since the human will is unsteady and wounded by sin, the achievement of peace requires a constant mastering of passions and the vigilance of lawful authority..."​

Peace on earth will "never be attained once and for all". The struggle against sin and human foibles will never cease before the end of time. For as long as their is history, it will be a history of continual striving against evil, the definitive completion of which will be for Catholics in the next world, not in this one.

But we regard it equally wrong to think that this means human civilization cannot "improve", to give into a nihilistic despair.

Millenarianism posits an end to the "struggle," as such it posits an end to history within history. That's not Catholic either.

The Church proclaims a different possibility, again from Vatican II:

"...That earthly peace which arises from love of neighbor symbolizes and results from the peace of Christ which radiates from God the Father...

Insofar as men are sinful, the threat of war hangs over them, and hang over them it will until the return of Christ.

But insofar as men vanquish sin by a union of love, they will vanquish violence as well and make these words come true: "They shall turn their swords into plough-shares, and their spears into sickles. Nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more" (Isaiah 2:4)...

It is our clear duty, therefore, to strain every muscle in working for the time when all war can be completely outlawed by international consent. This goal undoubtedly requires the establishment of some universal public authority acknowledged as such by all and endowed with the power to safeguard on the behalf of all, security, regard for justice, and respect for rights. But before this hoped for authority can be set up..."​

 

[sayak83]

Do you like your history linear or cyclical?

In his recent book, The Road to Unfreedom (2018), the Yale University Professor Timothy Snyder - a specialist on central and Eastern European history - drew a distinction between two allegedly competing worldviews: the politics of inevitability and the politics of eternity.

People falling into the first category (the inevitable) espouse the view that, while the past is undeniably complicated, bloody and chaotic, we are nonetheless "inching inexorably toward a freer, safer, more progressive world". It is underpinned by the confident assumption that there are "no alternatives" to a single, grand idea which represents "the end of history". This is more than a mere hope: it is a secular faith.

Good examples of inevitability politics would be the optimism of the USA in 1991 (after the fall of Communism) in the inevitable triumph of market economics, individual human rights and open, democratic societies. Another would be that of the Soviet Union, in its heyday, buoyed by its belief in the inevitability of global proletarian revolution and resulting post-capitalist, classless society.

I think we can see the evident pitfalls of this paradigm. No grand narratives like that are ever grounded in reality. They blind people to the ever-present trap of falling back into the kind of things you claim can't possibly happen. Liberal capitalism had its reckoning, in this respect, after the 2008 financial crisis, when ballooning disparities in income undermined "faith" in the goodness and inevitable rise in living standards heralded by free-marketers. Marxism-Leninism was, likewise, irreparably damaged by the revolutions of 1989-1991 which saw nearly every Communist regime of note (except in China and a few other remote hold-outs) consigned to the dustbin of history.

I would also, albeit with po-faced reluctance, have to include my beloved European Union (#BFF) in this category, with "ever-closer union" counting as its grand narrative while the Eurozone sovereign debt crisis and/or the spread of populism in the member states could be viewed as its existential moment of "reckoning".

Which is where the politics of eternity comes in. This worldview conceptualizes history as a tragic, cyclical phenomenon, as tied to past nostalgia as the politics of inevitability is to future optimism. According to Snyder, eternity politics "places one nation at the centre of a cyclical story of victimhood. Time is no longer a line into the future, but a circle that endlessly returns the same threats from the past." These politicians are often obsessed with restoring past greatness and promote a siege-mentality against supposedly perennial threats. See:

It is concerned with the past, but in a self-absorbed way, free of any real concerns with facts. Its mood is a longing for past moments that never really happened during epochs that were, in fact, disastrous. Eternity politicians bring us the past as a vast misty courtyard if illegible monuments to national victimhood, all of them equally distant from the present, all of them equally accessible for manipulation. Every reference to the past seems to involve an attack by some external enemy upon the purity of the nation.” ​

― Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century
​

Paradigmatic examples of countries in the grip of eternity politics would be Vladimir Putin's "postmodernist dictatorship" in Russia, Viktor Orban's "illiberal democracy" in Hungary, Brexshiit (sorry, cough) Brexit Britain's "merry Little England" and Donald Trump's "America First" United States.

Do you consider Synder's two paradigms to be useful or (alternately) crude and reductionist in scope?

If you think they are useful, then how might we inoculate ourselves against both the naive but dogmatic utopianism of inevitability politics and the xenophobic, backward-looking nihilism of eternity politics?

History is open ended and action (karma) dependent on the scales relevant to human civilization. Cosmological history is more of a brachiating spiral in the hundred trillion year scale.... According to Hindu and Buddhist ideas at least.

 

[shunyadragon]

I most definitely go with the nature of the history humanity is cyclical, and as well as the nature of our universe and physical existence as evolving for eternity. There is no hypothetical idealic past nor future as some expect in a mythical return to Christ ending all death and suffering bringing a utopian kingdom of God on earth.,

 

[Vouthon]

History is open ended and action (karma) dependent on the scales relevant to human civilization. Cosmological history is more of a brachiating spiral in the hundred trillion year scale.... According to Hindu and Buddhist ideas at least.

As ever, I love your interventions explaining Dharmic approaches.

So would it be safe to say that in the Indic worldview, human history is indeterministic other than through karmic conditions but in the cosmic scale largely cyclical except for those who attain moksha (freedom from the cycle of becoming, of birth and rebirth)? So there would be no equivalent to the Abrahamic faith in an immutable "divine plan"?

It always fascinates me that there were really only a few viable models in scientific cosmology in the 20th century and today, and that all the ancient religious creation myths fall within one of them. Skmilar desires motivate creation myths and scientific cosmology.

1. An eternal cosmos, without beginning and end (Aristotle, Jainism); and a cyclic cosmos, where the cosmos is created and destroyed in cycles similar to contemporary "bounce" cosmology i.e. Steinhardt (Vedanta?).

2. A linear cosmic history with a beginning and end point out of "nothing" (Christianity, Islam)

See:

From Myth To Science: Can We Make Sense Of The Origin Of All Things?

Curiously, before we had solid data, theories about the universe revisited each of the possible mythic solutions (without deities, of course): a cyclic cosmos, an eternal cosmos, a cosmos out of chaos, a cosmos "out of nothing," and a cosmos with a beginning. We are still grappling with a few of these possibilities (to be discussed in a future post), although "out of nothing" cosmologies — that is, cosmologies that suggest a quantum beginning and rely on the nothing from modern particle physics — are not really from a metaphysical "nothing," but already assume the current laws of physics, such as energy conservation and the principles of relativity and quantum physics, etc.​

 

[lewisnotmiller]

Do you like your history linear or cyclical?

In his recent book, The Road to Unfreedom (2018), the Yale University Professor Timothy Snyder - a specialist on central and Eastern European history - drew a distinction between two allegedly competing worldviews: the politics of inevitability and the politics of eternity.

People falling into the first category (the inevitable) espouse the view that, while the past is undeniably complicated, bloody and chaotic, we are nonetheless "inching inexorably toward a freer, safer, more progressive world". It is underpinned by the confident assumption that there are "no alternatives" to a single, grand idea which represents "the end of history". This is more than a mere hope: it is a secular faith.

Good examples of inevitability politics would be the optimism of the USA in 1991 (after the fall of Communism) in the inevitable triumph of market economics, individual human rights and open, democratic societies. Another would be that of the Soviet Union, in its heyday, buoyed by its belief in the inevitability of global proletarian revolution and resulting post-capitalist, classless society.

I think we can see the evident pitfalls of this paradigm. No grand narratives like that are ever grounded in reality. They blind people to the ever-present trap of falling back into the kind of things you claim can't possibly happen. Liberal capitalism had its reckoning, in this respect, after the 2008 financial crisis, when ballooning disparities in income undermined "faith" in the goodness and inevitable rise in living standards heralded by free-marketers. Marxism-Leninism was, likewise, irreparably damaged by the revolutions of 1989-1991 which saw nearly every Communist regime of note (except in China and a few other remote hold-outs) consigned to the dustbin of history.

I would also, albeit with po-faced reluctance, have to include my beloved European Union (#BFF) in this category, with "ever-closer union" counting as its grand narrative while the Eurozone sovereign debt crisis and/or the spread of populism in the member states could be viewed as its existential moment of "reckoning".

Which is where the politics of eternity comes in. This worldview conceptualizes history as a tragic, cyclical phenomenon, as tied to past nostalgia as the politics of inevitability is to future optimism. According to Snyder, eternity politics "places one nation at the centre of a cyclical story of victimhood. Time is no longer a line into the future, but a circle that endlessly returns the same threats from the past." These politicians are often obsessed with restoring past greatness and promote a siege-mentality against supposedly perennial threats. See:

It is concerned with the past, but in a self-absorbed way, free of any real concerns with facts. Its mood is a longing for past moments that never really happened during epochs that were, in fact, disastrous. Eternity politicians bring us the past as a vast misty courtyard if illegible monuments to national victimhood, all of them equally distant from the present, all of them equally accessible for manipulation. Every reference to the past seems to involve an attack by some external enemy upon the purity of the nation.” ​

― Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century
​

Paradigmatic examples of countries in the grip of eternity politics would be Vladimir Putin's "postmodernist dictatorship" in Russia, Viktor Orban's "illiberal democracy" in Hungary, Brexshiit (sorry, cough) Brexit Britain's "merry Little England" and Donald Trump's "America First" United States.

Do you consider Synder's two paradigms to be useful or (alternately) crude and reductionist in scope?

If you think they are useful, then how might we inoculate ourselves against both the naive but dogmatic utopianism of inevitability politics and the xenophobic, backward-looking nihilism of eternity politics?

I don't like it linear OR circular, but since I commonly rely on history to provide me with context on more modern events (or other historical events), and human nature generally, I clearly think circular is closer to reality.

But in a strict sense, the dichotomy appears ridiculous. I'm assuming it's more a broad way of considering more detailed topics. Or just a thought exercise.

I would say that linear beliefs appear to be a factor in fanatacism, whereas circular beliefs could encourage fatalism (to some degree). My personal version of fatalism I prefer to think of as 'perspective'.

 

[shunyadragon]

I don't like it linear OR circular, but since I commonly rely on history to provide me with context on more modern events (or other historical events), and human nature generally, I clearly think circular is closer to reality.

But in a strict sense, the dichotomy appears ridiculous. I'm assuming it's more a broad way of considering more detailed topics. Or just a thought exercise.

I would say that linear beliefs appear to be a factor in fanatacism, whereas circular beliefs could encourage fatalism (to some degree). My personal version of fatalism I prefer to think of as 'perspective'.

I beleive the concept is cyclical and not circular.

 

[lewisnotmiller]

I beleive the concept is cyclical and not circular.

True enough.
I guess my intent remains unchanged.

 

[David T]

Do you like your history linear or cyclical?

In his recent book, The Road to Unfreedom (2018), the Yale University Professor Timothy Snyder - a specialist on central and Eastern European history - drew a distinction between two allegedly competing worldviews: the politics of inevitability and the politics of eternity.

People falling into the first category (the inevitable) espouse the view that, while the past is undeniably complicated, bloody and chaotic, we are nonetheless "inching inexorably toward a freer, safer, more progressive world". It is underpinned by the confident assumption that there are "no alternatives" to a single, grand idea which represents "the end of history". This is more than a mere hope: it is a secular faith.

Good examples of inevitability politics would be the optimism of the USA in 1991 (after the fall of Communism) in the inevitable triumph of market economics, individual human rights and open, democratic societies. Another would be that of the Soviet Union, in its heyday, buoyed by its belief in the inevitability of global proletarian revolution and resulting post-capitalist, classless society.

I think we can see the evident pitfalls of this paradigm. No grand narratives like that are ever grounded in reality. They blind people to the ever-present trap of falling back into the kind of things you claim can't possibly happen. Liberal capitalism had its reckoning, in this respect, after the 2008 financial crisis, when ballooning disparities in income undermined "faith" in the goodness and inevitable rise in living standards heralded by free-marketers. Marxism-Leninism was, likewise, irreparably damaged by the revolutions of 1989-1991 which saw nearly every Communist regime of note (except in China and a few other remote hold-outs) consigned to the dustbin of history.

I would also, albeit with po-faced reluctance, have to include my beloved European Union (#BFF) in this category, with "ever-closer union" counting as its grand narrative while the Eurozone sovereign debt crisis and/or the spread of populism in the member states could be viewed as its existential moment of "reckoning".

Which is where the politics of eternity comes in. This worldview conceptualizes history as a tragic, cyclical phenomenon, as tied to past nostalgia as the politics of inevitability is to future optimism. According to Snyder, eternity politics "places one nation at the centre of a cyclical story of victimhood. Time is no longer a line into the future, but a circle that endlessly returns the same threats from the past." These politicians are often obsessed with restoring past greatness and promote a siege-mentality against supposedly perennial threats. See:

It is concerned with the past, but in a self-absorbed way, free of any real concerns with facts. Its mood is a longing for past moments that never really happened during epochs that were, in fact, disastrous. Eternity politicians bring us the past as a vast misty courtyard if illegible monuments to national victimhood, all of them equally distant from the present, all of them equally accessible for manipulation. Every reference to the past seems to involve an attack by some external enemy upon the purity of the nation.” ​

― Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century
​

Paradigmatic examples of countries in the grip of eternity politics would be Vladimir Putin's "postmodernist dictatorship" in Russia, Viktor Orban's "illiberal democracy" in Hungary, Brexshiit (sorry, cough) Brexit Britain's "merry Little England" and Donald Trump's "America First" United States.

Do you consider Synder's two paradigms to be useful or (alternately) crude and reductionist in scope?

If you think they are useful, then how might we inoculate ourselves against both the naive but dogmatic utopianism of inevitability politics and the xenophobic, backward-looking nihilism of eternity politics?

The "no grand narrative is actually not related to science at all. It's a kind of grand narrative unto itself it points to itself as the grand narrative about grand narrative. It's self referential. Religious folks do it constantly as well. It's normal craftsman level understanding is all.

 

[Sunstone]

Do you consider Synder's two paradigms to be useful or (alternately) crude and reductionist in scope?

What a thought-provoking and refreshingly off the beaten path (for RF) OP!

As an aside, I like to tell you and some other folks that sort of thing, not because I love merely feel-good cheering, but because I have firm hopes of eventually hitting y'all up for some serious cash it's a bit of a relief to feel I can safely say such positive things and still be reasonably accurate.

That aside, your OP immediately reminded me of Mircea Eliade's belief that a culture's or a people's most significant myths could often be categorized into those that ground the justification for their values in a Golden Age lying the past, or a Golden Age lying in the future. I seem to recall that Christianity did both -- the Garden of Eden and the Post-Apocalyptic Utopia in Revelations, but it's been decades since I actually studied him, and it would be safest not to rely on my memory.

Next, useful or reductionist? I think neither model of history hews close enough to the facts to be of any great value to understanding the causes of historical change. But that's not their intended purpose, is it? At least methinks Synder's models are intended to accurately characterize the essential traits and general political implications -- not of history -- but of how most people perhaps mainly subconsciously view history. And that respect I believe they hew close enough to reality to be quite useful.

So many obvious examples of their usefulness. They could have explained both Trump's and Sanders' notably enthusiastic popularity in the last election cycle. And perhaps even Clinton's notable lack of much enthusiasm for her candidacy. I don't think she was effective at connecting her message to either view of history. If those views have importasnce to them, then it's a conclusion easily reached that her failure to connect to either one of them might have been quite significant, perhaps even decisive.

Which leaves the question, can the models be greatly improved upon? I don't really know, but here's a suggestion: We might look to see if there other popular ways of seeing history. There are, at least, more common orientations than just past and future. Some people think Americans are especially rooted in the present, but if so, what are the political implications of that?

Beyond that, why divided history into past, present, and future? As Eliade argues, history can be, and in some cultures actually is, divided into sacred time and profane time. Profane time is past, present, and future. Sacred time is eternally now. It is not merely recurring, like Syder's cyclical history, but eternally always occurring. Are there enough people left in the world today who see history in that way, that it would be worth looking to the political implications of it? Again, I don't know.

If you think they are useful, then how might we inoculate ourselves against both the naive but dogmatic utopianism of inevitability politics and the xenophobic, backward-looking nihilism of eternity politics?

I don't know an answer to your question, but maybe an approach would be to identify the similarities between "inoculating" ourselves the dangers of believing in either of Syder's models, and say, any possibility of inoculating ourselves against the dangers of believing in purely non-evolutionary notions of life. Although we have not been very successful at the latter in America, I think we have enough clues from mainly Western and Northern Europe to emphasize the value of a good education in the evolutionary sciences -- or in this case, in history, political science, and the philosophy of history.

 

[Sunstone]

I'm assuming it's more a broad way of considering more detailed topics. Or just a thought exercise.

I neither, I think. Rather than a way of looking at history itself, Syder's models are, in my insufferable opinion, intended to be ways of looking at the political implications of what people perhaps subconsciously assume is how history works.

 

[lewisnotmiller]

I neither, I think. Rather than a way of looking at history itself, Syder's models are, in my insufferable opinion, intended to be ways of looking at the political implications of what people perhaps subconsciously assume is how history works.

*Considers*

Hmmm...ok. I can see how that might fit based on the OP.
But I guess I'd still see that as a kind of thought exercise. No person fits too neatly into those boxes (although manifest destiny might suggest otherwise), so you run the risk of reducing your opinions to parody if taken too literally.

Err...the you in this isn't 'you' Phil. I thank you for your insight, as I'm not familiar with Syder.

 

[Augustus]

Interestingly, it was the theological fashion of medieval theologians to combine a teleological belief in progressive development of doctrine (and the myth of a future period of peace for the Church and world, most recently popularised for lay consumption through the Fatima apparitions) with an intellectual trend known by the name typology, which advocated a cyclical and semi-tragic understanding of Christian history, as a grand re-enactment of 'types' foreshadowed in the Old Testament people of Israel.

Some of these earlier ideas seem to be reflected in Bishop Bousset's Universal history, written for Louis XIV's son:

Thus I have no more to say upon the first part of Universal History. You will discover all its secrets, and it will now be entirely in your own power to observe in it the whole progression of Religion and succession of great empires down to Charlemagne. While you see them fall, almost all of themselves, and shall see Religion support itself by its own power, you will easily understand what is solid greatness, and wherein a wise man ought to place his hope.

You probably already know this and much more though

I only know about this by 'reading backwards' a little because Bousset influenced Turgot who influenced Condorcet who contributed greatly to the modern Secular Humanist version of the Idea of Progress. The idea that most Humanists fail to realise is mostly just Christian theology with Divine Providence replaced by Reason.

St. Bonaventure formulated a “theology of history” in which there are Seven Ages of the Church, mirroring what he believed had been Seven Ages in the life of the Old Testament Jews. But he balanced this out with a progressive conviction that our understanding of revelation - morality, knowledge, God's will - progresses with time, in a linear unidirectional way even through times of cyclical collapse

The idea that we progress through ages in a linear manner is also reflected in secular doctrines like Auguste Comte's Positivism which saw humanity going from theological stage (animist to polytheist to monotheist), metaphysical, then the rational Positivist stage. Comte was almost certainly also influenced by Condorcet and Turgot.

It's interesting to learn about some of the earlier influences without having to do any hard work. Thanks

 

[sayak83]

As ever, I love your interventions explaining Dharmic approaches.

So would it be safe to say that in the Indic worldview, human history is indeterministic other than through karmic conditions but in the cosmic scale largely cyclical except for those who attain moksha (freedom from the cycle of becoming, of birth and rebirth)? So there would be no equivalent to the Abrahamic faith in an immutable "divine plan"?

It always fascinates me that there were really only a few viable models in scientific cosmology in the 20th century and today, and that all the ancient religious creation myths fall within one of them. Skmilar desires motivate creation myths and scientific cosmology.

1. An eternal cosmos, without beginning and end (Aristotle, Jainism); and a cyclic cosmos, where the cosmos is created and destroyed in cycles similar to contemporary "bounce" cosmology i.e. Steinhardt (Vedanta?).

2. A linear cosmic history with a beginning and end point out of "nothing" (Christianity, Islam)

See:

From Myth To Science: Can We Make Sense Of The Origin Of All Things?

Curiously, before we had solid data, theories about the universe revisited each of the possible mythic solutions (without deities, of course): a cyclic cosmos, an eternal cosmos, a cosmos out of chaos, a cosmos "out of nothing," and a cosmos with a beginning. We are still grappling with a few of these possibilities (to be discussed in a future post), although "out of nothing" cosmologies — that is, cosmologies that suggest a quantum beginning and rely on the nothing from modern particle physics — are not really from a metaphysical "nothing," but already assume the current laws of physics, such as energy conservation and the principles of relativity and quantum physics, etc.​

The divine "plan" is to create many many dynamic and interesting worlds over time. The divine Brahman has an inherent create urge... it wishes to be.. to manifest oneself in as many ways as possible. This aesthetic creative tendency is counterbalanced by the ethical tendency to become and be the One Singularity, for unity and non-duality is its essence. Creations rise and fall like waves on an ocean, or like flowers on a stem of Brahman out of these two innate tendencies of Brahman. This human mode of life for us is but a small part of this great creation-transformation-dissolution wave that is beginingless and endless. As Gita says


Truly there was never a time when
I was not,
Nor you, nor these lords of men;
And neither will there be a time when
we shall cease to be
From this time onward.


It is found that the unreal has no being;
It is found that there is no non-being
of the real.
The certainty of both these
propositions is indeed surely seen
By the perceivers of truth.

Know that that by which all this
universe
Is pervaded is indeed indestructible;
No one is able to accomplish
The destruction of the imperishable.

Neither is this (the embodied Self)
born nor does it die at any time,
Nor, having been, will it again come
not to be.
Birthless, eternal, perpetual,
primaeval,
It is not slain when the body is slain.


Though this exposition, is my own.

 

[Vouthon]

I neither, I think. Rather than a way of looking at history itself, Syder's models are, in my insufferable opinion, intended to be ways of looking at the political implications of what people perhaps subconsciously assume is how history works.

Precisely! If you look at my OP, you'll note that Synder says he is describing the crude worldviews presupposed by many people in certain societies, and he ultimately condemns both as being phantoms that ignore the facts and are dangerous.

So, as you say, its not a case of actually accurately understanding history but rather flawed, subconscious perceptions and how certain powers that be exploit people by means of these narratives.