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:
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?
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.”
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?
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