Time Magazine's decision to name George Bush as Person of the Year was surprising, not for the choice (was the MSM really to name its mortal enemy, the blogosphere?), but for the tone it took. The picture of the President bore the caption: "George Bush: American Revolutionary." Surely, the title wrankled many on the left, for whom the term "Revolutionary" means leftism by definition. While I didn't see much play in the mainstream press about it, it did not escape notice. A standard objection may be found here, a standard defense here.
I have no objection to the term, even as one who considers himself politically conservative had had hoped that in voting to re-elect the President I was putting another conservative in power. And my lack of objection speaks to my premise, which is that we live in the Age of Revolution.
One of the better works of history I have come across has been Will and Ariel Durant’s Story of Civilization series. They are massive; 6-700 pages each, and overwhelming in the detail with which they flood the reader. The Durants give us politics, law, the lives of kings, the quirks of past historians, the grandeur of architecture; the passions of poets and philosophes, and the overall taste of ages past. One gets the sense of having been in the mind of St. Paul, or Titian, or Augustus Caeser, of having witnessed Cannae and the Reign of Terror, of having walked through narrow streets chatting with Ben Jonson or Catullus.
They are not without their downside, of course. They require disciplined readership; to date I’ve only managed to devour Volume 9: The Age of Voltaire. I don’t remember why I started there; somehow I’ve always felt an affinity for Voltaire, which perhaps stems from the fact that he and I share the same birthday (Nov 21). I’ve skimmed parts of other volumes, absorbed sections of others, but never fully. Perhaps when school lets out I’ll devote the summer to them.
The other downside is that they tend to lose their majestic scale as they progress. Volume 1 includes the millennia of Stone Age humans, Egypt, and Mesopotamia. Volume 2 tells the life of Ancient Greece, Volume 3, Rome and the Rise of Christianity, Volume 4, the thousand years between Rome’s fall and the Reformation. But there are 11 volumes, and so the briefs become smaller in scope. The 15th, 16th, and 17th centuries roughly occupy volumes 5-8, and the 18th is the scope of volumes 9 and 10. By the time we get to volume 11, the "Age of Napoleon," we get but 26 years.
There’s something of the aesthetic to this objection, but 26 years is hardly an age. Durant has no difficulty filling the tome, with names and facts both familiar and surprising, and Napoleon is well deserving of many books about him. But while the years 1789-1815 were certainly epoch-making, they are not themselves the epoch. Durant’s work is best when bringing the large perspective to history, and here that is sadly lacking.
All of which begs the question: What defines our age? What gives moral legitimacy to our social structures? What justification drives our politics?
What can it be, but "Revolution"?
Ours is an age of speed, when today is pushed quickly into the past and yesterday as soon forgotten. What is our hurry? For millennia mankind lived generation-to-generation with so few ripples in its cycle that they have come down to us by name. Tribe grew to kingdom, kingdom grew to empire, empire wallowed in excess and was overwhelmed by tribes. Whether you name it Akkad, Maurya, Zhou, or Roma, the story is always the same. The center expands, the center rots, the king is shuffled off and all good men shout God/Buddha/Allah Save…
Then, in the last quarter the 18th century, humanity, began to reject this dynamic utterly. I date the beginning of the Age of Revolution from 1775, not 1789, not because I believe the American Revolution to be the only one that matters, but because I do not believe the French Revolution, and her daughter the Russian, to be the only ones that matter.
But let us halt, and define our terms. By "Revolution," I mean the willful casting aside of a political and/or social order for a presumed better one, and when that order is established, defended and expanded. The call to Revolution is heard daily in modern discourse. Whether you are animated by feminism, Marxism, gay rights, environmentalism, and yes, even free-market capitalism, you are seeking to change the existing order to one which will be more beneficial to whichever group you happen to care about. The image of truth struggling against mass perversity has been powerful in every age, but it is absolute in ours.
No time in human history has been more hostile to arguments of (small-c) conservatism. In times past, heritage and tradition had powerful holds on human imaginations. To a lesser degree, they still do, but to argue on the basis of nothing else has long been held to be the last refuge of the bigoted ignoramus. Since the 18th century, everything humanity has believed itself to understand has been subject to scrutiny. I do not judge that scrutiny to have been wholly negative. Indeed, I regard it as part of a natural rythmn of the collective grasping of truth. I merely point out how total and merciless the scrutiny has been, how all-encompassing.
The ancient laws regarding political, familial, sexual, and moral order have all either been overthrown, or have a loud party seeking their overthrow. Even in the absence of pressure to reform or undo a tradition, there is a seeming presumption that changing the world, and changing it now, would be the moral choice. It has entered the popular and commercial discourses as well, in the fuzzy-minded utopianism of pop singers and stand-up comics. To them, the status quo is always "so fucked up," and the Man is always to blame, whoever He happens to be (generally, anyone who speaks three kind words in favor of old traditions), and if only we could find the will…
Let me be clearer. I am not in favor of bringing anything back to the pre-1775 order. I am fine with the abandonment of monarchial feudalism, scientific creationism, the exclusion of women from the public sphere. I am not even opposed to humanity’s ongoing self-scrutiny. The Reality Principle decrees that what humans do, they have a reason for doing, and I must be careful in judging it. At present, I am merely describing the age we live in, the presumptions that are encoded in our words.
One of the problems is that we do not agree on Revolution (but of course…if we did, we would not need it). Many would place the proper ends of it towards this problem but not that one, to destroy this institution but leave that one alone. Vague labels, such as "right" and "left" muddy these waters even further. I think the best explanation is that there are two kinds of Revolution: the liberal and the social.
The Liberal Revolution is the enemy of the state. Anything which restricts the political or economic rights of the individual, the Liberal Revolution opposes. And by "rights," I mean the freedom of the individual to engage in self-generated political or economic activity. In a liberal state, no person is artificially restricted from saying or selling, from starting a political party, or a business. That is where the revolution ends. No one in a liberal society has any claim on anyone else, other than that his rights will not be violated.
Note that these rights are not necessarily intended to be taken to their logical conclusion: the right to say or sell anything. This is the difference between a liberal and a libertarian. The Liberal Revolution is not opposed to forms of social control; rather it depends on these, and not the state, to create social order. Censorship may be and is applied to all things which a balance of society names anathema: pornography, sedition, human slavery (if one is free to sell anything, why not human beings?). But the Index Expurgatorius is sharply limited and open to debate.
In addition, liberal societies tend to place restrictions on the state’s power to prosecute criminals. There are elaborate legal safeguards, regulations on how crime is investigated, and extensive right of appeal. None of which always prevents an innocent man from being convicted, but it falls entirely within the concept of the place of, and fear of, government in a liberal society. It is there to serve; not to be served.
The Social Revolution, arguably the Liberal's angry son, has a widely different, even open-ended, goal. The Social Revolution is the enemy of wherever power, authority, or influence is being exercised. Following Rousseau, the socialist believes that human structures are inherently unjust. In the extreme form, social programs advocate violent destruction of existing modes of power, with the expectation that humanity, thus freed from falsehood like the man in Plato's Allegory of the Cave, will start again, down the path that has now been made clear, whatever that might be. In the more moderate form, the socialist acts as critic and gadfly, exposing the injustices and failures in society and demanding, in as loud a voice as possible, a redress. Where the liberal opposes centralized tyranny, the socialist opposes local injustice, and through the cracks in the system, denounces the whole.
These two revolutions have been at war at least since 1789, when a social revolution piggy-backed over a liberal one and, from its starting point of tearing down the Sun Monarchy in France, moved on to attacking the institution that gave France her social control: the Catholic Church. From there, Napoleon fought not for the restriction of the state but for the social dominance of the new, enlightened ruling class. The last liberal revolution occurred in 1848, in Germany, and it was defeated by a monarchy that would use the program of socialists to retain dominance. Since then, Europe has moved ever gradually toward the social camp, growing an ever-larger bureaucracy with which to legislate the end of any form of inequality. This has even occurred in Britian, which gave birth to liberalism in the 17th Century.
Taken in that context, the history of the 20th century is the history of the clash of the two Revolutions. That the social-militarist Kaiserreich in Germany should have proven poor soil for the liberal Weimar state does not surprise, nor that the even more Socialist, even more Militarist Third Reich. Many deny that Hitler and Mussolini were socialists, despite the evidence, because they were nationalists and used nationalist symbols. But as I have defined the Social Revolution, nationalism need not be excluded from it, if the ruling class is deemed anti-national, as the Weimar state was. As there are many forms of human society, so there are many forms of social control, so there are many injustices, real or imagined, to rebel against. The fascist was merely a different form of socialist than the communist. Both hated liberals.
In the Cold war, therefore, we see the liberal and the social revolutions wrestling one another to the ground; the one that tapped out lost. The collapse of the Soviet Untion however, does not mean the end of social revolutionaries or socialist criticism. During the Cold War, both the U.S. and Europe, bastions of liberalism, became more socialist. European socialism has been earlier described. American socialism took the more moderate form of social criticsm and undermining traditional mores. The results have been mixed; greater public acceptance of women and racial minorities, coupled with an increase in social pathologies and venereal diseases, and a decrease in the birth rate.
Thus, the proper way to try to explain the differences in the American poltical dynamic to non-Americans, increasingly important in this day and age, is to drop the terms "conservative" and "liberal". American "Conservatives" seek to protect and expand the Revolution of 1775, the last and arguably most successful Liberal Revolution. American "Liberals" are actually socialists, who reject the title because of its connotative connection with Communism. But it is social injustices that "Liberals" fight, and social solutions that they propose and seek to defend against liberal attacks, like the proposed reform of Social Security (perhaps the last honestly named program in the federal government).
The Republican party is thus the party of American liberals, and the Democratic party that of American socialists. Both defend a Revolution, both believe themselves oppressed by the other, both promise that freedom will follow their success. In his wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, President Bush has thus made the expansion of the Liberal Revolution to be the weapon against both Islamism (a grotesque cross-breeding of medieval will-to-power with anti-semitic fascism) and the increasingly socialist international bureaucracy. Which side will win will be the story of at least the first part of this century.
Thank you, drive through...
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