Memory, Irony, and the Future
Diffuse Reflections on Kipling, Armageddon, and Horseshoe Crabs
Serpette (Décadi), 20 Pluviôse, CCXXXIV
§1:
O tempora, o mores! And, while we’re at it, Ah, Bartleby! Ah, humanity! But that can wait for now. Just at the moment, it is times and customs that concern me. Cicero, of course, was lamenting the decline in the social standards and practices of his day, and giving voice to a mood that every generation apparently feels with regard to its own age. Poignant as it may be, however, it rarely reflects an objective truth about the past or the present apart from the obvious fact of things constantly changing and of our tendency to view the vanished years through a distorting lens of either nostalgia or disaffection. The past was always better, of course, but also was worse, and it all evens out in the end when we have become dust and the wail is raised anew by those who succeed us. At least, that used to be the case. Right now, just about everything is worse than it used to be, and everything that isn’t worse is simply some lingering feature of the past that we have not yet succeeded in extinguishing. And one of the things that is worse about the present is precisely our inability to see the past with anything like imaginative sympathy. Cicero may have idealized the great age of the Republic and the society it sheltered under its senatorial wings, but at least this spared him falling into the trap of complacency or self-satisfaction. It never occurred to him—as it generally never occurred to any pre-modern persons or peoples, since as yet they had no concept of ‘progress’ as a historical judgement—to condemn previous ages for their perverse parochialism in not having achieved the values of the present. There is no wisdom regarding one’s place in history more salutary than the knowledge that we never occupy an unassailable or unsurpassable position of moral competency, no matter how admirably we may have taken leave of certain evils of the past, and that we are the products rather than the authors of the moral convictions we hold.
What point am I trying to make, though? This is a very good question. I am not sure I know the answer, because the special pathology of (let’s call it) ‘presentism’ is very much typical of our time in a special way, and is characteristic of just about every social faction, at least among those who have any opinion on their society at all. It goes both ways, moreover. It is a vice found on both the right and the left, always accompanied by sanctimony and usually by hysteria. If in the past the disease was chronic, the technology and social economy of today has rendered it acute and virulent. Any great monochromatic moral verdict on the present state of things in relation to how things were in the past is likely to be little more than a bigotry concealed from itself. Even cultural conservatives are not really conservative as a rule in any genuinely meaningful way; it is simply the case that the past to which they feel superior in insight and motive is a more recent past than the one deplored by more progressive spirits. Rather than the ages of faith and dogma or the premodern as such, it is the period in which humankind turned away from certain social forms, shared beliefs, and powerful institutions that they disdain. The same failure of moral imagination is at work in either case, however. Whereas the most complacent secularists, for instance, often see in the religions, philosophies, and social arrangements of the premodern only a sort of intellectual infancy presided over by oppressive structures of power, the most bilious traditionalists just as often see in the scientific revolution, the Enlightenment, and the liberal state only a perverse apostasy from common sense, social order, and moral purpose. What all parties seem incapable of is enough historical consciousness and moral tact to imagine themselves back into the conditions of the past, to try to grasp from inside the rational and moral experience of those societies that have passed away, and to recognize both the good motives and the bad, and to allow that knowledge to apprise them of both the limitations and the real possibilities of the present. Ideally, after all, the refusal to pass an absolute judgement upon the past should function to disabuse us of too inflexible a certainty regarding our own moral prejudices. This is not a counsel of relativism or pure historicism; it’s simply a very roundabout way of saying we should read a lot of Kipling.
