History, Confucius, Hegel, and Bettie Page
In a recent post, Jason poses good questions about Confucius and how we view history more generally. As for Confucius’s idealization of the Duke of Zhou, the little I know about Chinese history suggests that the Duke really was a great and important figure who inaugurated a long and peaceful dynasty. However, it is impossible to say if Confucius is right that statesmen, in general, were better during that era, or that they were all lousy during his time. Quite likely, what he says on the subject tells us more about Confucius than about Chinese history.
He is idealizing the past and hoping to revive its culture. Jason has shown the dangers in this view of history before. As Jason writes: “What we end up getting more often than not are summaries of personal prejudices written as though they were history.” Also, he notes that valorizing the past can blind you to the many things that are better now and it’s fairly easy to become mired. As a Jello Biafra song memorably put it, “That was then and this is now, and suckling up to sacred cows can leave you stuck in the mud with their remains.”
In terms of our history, Jason has a special perspective that likely allows him to see the failings of a conservative yen to return to the golden age. As a homosexual, he perhaps would not agree if I said, “Hey Jason, wouldn’t we be much happier living in the 1950s?” Probably not. Similarly, this line wouldn’t convince many women or blacks. This is not a blind spot, but a special insight.
At any rate, I don’t believe in narratives of decline or progressive enlightenment either because I don’t believe in teleological explanations of history. That is, while change over time can be shown, I don’t believe that history is moving in any particular direction towards any specific endpoint. The obvious example is Christian teleology. However, the 19th century saw a proliferation of historicist arguments that the human spirit was approaching a sort of self-aware perfection, an argument that could be, not entirely correctly, called Hegelian. I can find you many very positivistic reflections on history in that century which argue that, since the species is becoming progressively more rational, virtuous, scientific, and pacifistic, the 20th will be a century without war. It’s perhaps good to take these books with a grain of salt.
Similarly, narratives of decline would have us wiped out by now. The obvious example there would be Malthus, but even after the horrors of the 20th century, Spengler sounds a bit like a crank. The problem is that humans, sorry to say, aren’t very good at predicting the future. Moreover, narratives about the virtuous past or the terrible past tend to be exaggerated, inaccurate, and somewhat stifling: the virtuous because we’d rather be in the past than deal with the present; the terrible because arguing things have never been better encourages complacency.
I think, instead, we now take a creative approach to the past. Especially because the past no longer holds us in its cold grasp- our era has severed all ties with history. Many of us live in other towns (or countries) than where we grew up. Few of us work the same job our whole lives anymore. We move, change jobs, end marriages, leave churches. Mobility has increased and the power of the past and of traditions has receded. Faulkner’s oft-quoted line about the past not even being the past is, itself, a relic of a different time.
History profs are also right in bemoaning the total lack of historical awareness or sense on the part of the present generation. But, as the past no longer has any bearing on this generation, perhaps learning history would be as useless to them as learning Coptic. In the book we’re reading, Chris Hedges writes: “Those who suffer from historical amnesia, the belief that we are unique in history and have nothing to learn from the past, remain children. They live in an illusion.” And he’s absolutely right. But this historical dislocation conversely makes the past, instead of a lost golden age or a mind-forged manacle, something else: a source of creative potential.
Creative anachronisms are flourishing. For example, every city I’ve lived in has had a number of white, college-educated, feminist-leaning women for whom Bettie Page is a personal hero. They’re often into burlesque, retro pinups, and a certain 50s image of female sexuality. They’ll say those images are more “natural”, “glamorous”, and a “celebration of women”- even “empowering”; while today’s images reduce female sexuality to another consumer item, these ones seem to raise it up to the status of a magic fetish. And yet, none of those women would want to live in the 50s and deal with the gender roles of that era. They’re fully aware that women had fewer options in that time. And I think they’re also aware that what they’re responding to is the paradoxical fact that patriarchies strip women of actual power and influence, while investing them with exaggerated imaginative power and influence. I’d call this the Napoleon/Josephine syndrome: he was one of the most powerful men in human history; yet, even today, more people know that he was a cuckold than how he won the Battle of Austerlitz.
But that imaginative power is latent because none of us have to live within patriarchal gender roles. We can play dress-up and camp it up with ironic self-awareness. We can draw creatively from the past because it has no power over us; it is as indifferent a matter as eating Chinese one night and Mexican the next. We could call it historical tourism, or temporal multiculturalism, we the wandering amnesiacs. The break with the past allows us to treat it as a source of latency, instead of a burden or a golden age. We can all be magpies. Not remembering the past, we’re likely condemned to repeat it (torture, ill-conceived wars, and recessions a go-go); conversely, we have no excuse if the future is boring.
You might find Friedrich Hayek’s The Counterrevolution of Science interesting, particularly the later chapters. There are some very direct, often personal connections between Hegel and the positivists. It makes intuitive sense, and it even turns out to be confirmed historically.Report
@Jason Kuznicki, Yeah, I sort of thought they were there. I’d have to look, but I think Georg Iggers must have touched on that in The German Conception of History, which is highly recommended.
I will check out the Hayek. By some strange coincidence, I found out today that the local library has been getting in the volumes of his collected works.Report
Dude, any analysis of history is significant only if it acknowledges that man is defined as that being who conjures order through existence within the metalepsis, the communion with God. Consequently, we might consider that the telos of history begins in the movement of the Logos in time, where the knowledge of Him is illuminated for the “oikoumene”, the known world, and is brought to denouement in the Second Coming and the Apocalypse.
“However, the 19th century saw a proliferation of historicist arguments that the human spirit was approaching a sort of self-aware perfection, an argument that could be, not entirely correctly, called Hegelian.”
I would take issue with your interpretation above, insofar that that period of time up to and including the present represents in general a “deculturation of the West” where as Voegelin comments “..the grotesque rubble into which the image of God is broken today is not somebody’s wrong opinion about the nature of man but the result of a secular process of destruction.”
When our existence is outside the noetic field of the push/pull related to life and death “and the tension between the human and divine reality” than we have failed to ground our existence on the truth rather we ground of self that reveal itself as a perverse speculative system, very much reflecting Hegel, Marx, and similar deformations “..of the life of reason through the magic practice of self-divination and self-salvation.” (Voegelin, CW, Vol. 12, Published Essays).Report
@Bob Cheeks, I’d actually agree with Voegelin on Hegel. I see God in Hegel, but a broken-up and man-based version, that might well be part of “the deculturation of the west”.
To be fair, Hegel once said, “only one man ever understood what I am saying, and he didn’t really understand.” I can’t say I’m entirely justified in my sense that Hegelian thinking is an ill wind that has blown little good.Report
I think there is a prevailing human tendency across all times, races, and cultures to think of ourselves as “special”. How much this tendency biases our history is endlessly debatable, but I wouldn’t consider it unreasonable (technological advance being implicitly excluded from my model) that my life as a teacher bears more resemblance to that of a teacher in ancient Greece than it does to the life of a farmer or a doctor in 2010.Report
You’re right that any analysis of Hegel is an “iffy’ proposition…at least for me. I am far more inclined toward Von Schelling (at least what I know and understand of him) in his rejection of Hegel’s project and his freedom, love, God differentiation of the transcendent.
Hegel, Voegelin tells us, is understood in the question of ‘Selfs’ and the Death of God which can only occur “in the fullness in “Hegel’s’ system. So, I think, it is here that the ‘deculturation of the West’ reaches something of an apogee in its forward rush through history..the complete hypostatization of the transcendent (the obliteration of God).
I’ve recently taken to asking Peter Lawler question’s related to Rawls and Rorty along these lines to determine if this ‘deculturation’ continues, this idea of self-salvation is dominent in society, or if there is some other existential movement currently in vogue.
This was a good piece, Rufus.Report