The End of History and the Bourgeois Type

Because we live in an age that is dominated by bourgeois values and the bourgeois worldview, we assume that this is the way it will always be. Francis Fukuyama, echoing Hegel, asks whether becoming bourgeois isn't the whole goal (end) of history--the bourgeois as the pinnacle of human development. Well, I hope not. Neither really does Fukuyama.

There is much to commend in the bourgeois as the type who replaced the courtier aristocrat as the modern age supplanted the medieval. But the bourgeois has become a degraded type now very similar in moral stature to the degraded aristocrat of the 17th Century. The bourgeois has become increasingly the Last Man who is interested only in his gadgets and his bread and circuses. Nazism, for instance, was among other things born of a kind of revulsion with the degraded bourgeois, and its appeal lay in its enshrinement of the older ideal embodied in the Aryan warrior as the national type. That longing for a more noble, pre-bourgeois past is the key to the emotional appeal of fascism.

We look now at Hitler and Mussolini as clowns, each in his own way a joke whom it is hard to believe now any one took seriously in their day. But if we are to learn anything from that experience, it’s most important to understand what made fascism so attractive to so many people. The resurgence of fascism is quite possible even in countries like the U.S., because the conditions that gave rise to it—namely, the spiritual vacuum created by the dissolution of modern rationalist optimism, still define the cultural mood of the contemporary West.

We have lost faith in the ideals of Enlightenment humanism and with nothing having taken its place, we have defaulted to the bourgeois Last Man, the man who is incapable of transcendent aspiration. Enlightenment ideals still shape our world to some extent, but they won't stand up to pressure. They didn't stand up in Germany, which was a great creative center for the development and propagation of Enlightenment rationalism, and we are deluding ourselves if we think that we Americans are strong enough to stand up to the kind of pressure we're likely to face in the coming decades. 

Fascism is not something that presents itself in obvious ways. It sneaks up on you, and the next thing you know the country is electing someone like Hitler--someone everyone underestimates at first, someone the establishment elite thinks it can control. The Germans who voted for him didn't think he was an evil guy. And if it happens in America someday, the Americans who vote to put such a one in office won't think so either. He'll be a good Christian. He will appeal to everyone for whom patriotism isn't a word you enclose in scare quotes.

We wonder how in retrospect brilliant minds like Martin Heidegger and Ezra Pound could have fallen for fascist rhetoric and could have bought into its twisted vision. But for them, and for so many others, the attraction lay not so much in what fascism affirmed, but in what it rejected—modernity and its Last Man mediocrity. We look in hindsight at Heidegger and Pound and regard them as morally deficient for their fascism, but what attracted them to fascism was not its brutality, but rather its hatred for modernity and its business culture, and the hollow, flat-souled, overly cerebral human type it created. Fascism is a way of looking for transcendence in all the wrong places, i.e., in the past. But the argument of this blog from the beginning is that it can only be sanely sought in the future--an Absolute Future, to use Karl Rahner's language for it. There lies the end of history, after the future.

Sure, it’s easy in retrospect to condemn fascism because now we know the horrors it perpetrated. But our dismissal of fascism has become so automatic, so thoughtless, especially among our editorialists and other keepers of the bourgeois faith, that there is very little understanding about what makes it so attractive, especially to young people.

Fascism is best understood as a primitivistic, anti-modern movement that attracted people with its romanticism of a return to the purity of its warrior tribal origins. Fascism was a celebration of the bold, audacious will to power--an adolescent preoccupation, perhaps, but no less dangerous for that. It’s a lot easier to imagine a boy idolizing a gallant warrior, even if he’s an outlaw—even if he’s a Nazi storm trooper--than to imagine him doing the same for a shrewd investment banker. The first is a romantic anti-establishment hero. The second is a greedy, calculating villain.

If you are a dyed-in-the-wool bourgeois, it’s extremely difficult to understand the appeal of the National Rifle Association exactly for this reason. Owning a gun, like piercing one’s tongue, is an effective way to say I’m not one of those empty corporate or bureaucratic suits who has no real idea who he is or what he stands for except to measure his life by his corporate promotions and trophy wives. “I own a gun,” says the NRA redneck. “I am a hunter warrior--don’t mess with me. Just try taking my gun away, you gutless bureaucrat. Make my day.”

My point here is not to justify fascism or the NRA mentality, but to try to understand its pervasive and persistent appeal. It goes back to a longing to assert ourselves as a people of valor by showing that we are willing to refuse craven self-interest, and to gallantly risk all for an honorable cause. We don’t look at Nazis that way, but that’s how they looked at themselves. We don’t look at Islamic terrorists that way, but that’s how they look at themselves. And all of our action movies celebrate the same pose. We admire the gallant risk taker, the man with guts, not the sweet guy who wants everybody to be safe and happy.

It’s all regressive and nostalgic, especially now since real warfare in the twentieth century has offered little possibility for gallantry from the mindless mechanical slaughter in the trenches during WWI to the bureaucratic futility of Vietnam to the drone warfare in the Mideast. The warrior has evolved into the technician, and the technician is a classic bourgeois. Perhaps that's another reason we went into Iraq--Americans needed to prove to themselves they still had the guts to fight on the ground.

There is still some residue of the gallant warrior in some of our sports figures, but that image and our ability to admire them as warrior heroes has been compromised by their bourgeoisification as millionaire businessmen, too often more concerned with their contracts and endorsement deals than with the good of the team, or loyalty to a city and its fans. It's rare for any of them to display the idea of honor in the old-fashioned sense. That’s why we have such feeling now for icons such as Joe DiMaggio, Lou Gehrig, Jackie Robinson. They had “class”; they were each aristocrats in the old-fashioned sense, and among our contemporaries Michael Jordan is the only one who comes close to what they represented then to the culture at large. (Cal Ripken displayed something else, more of a lunchpail, blue-collar stolidity. I don't think of him as an aristocratic warrior.)

So it’s understandable that many spirited people loathe what the bourgeois has come to symbolize and feel a compelling need to define their own lives and identities over against the bourgeois image. They have to find some way to act out to prove it to themselves. Some do it by demonstrating against the WTO or the World Bank. Some by joining a fight club, others by risking their lives in extreme sports, others by piercings and tatoos.  All of these behaviors are ways to rebel against the soulless, prosperity- and security-obsessed, slavish Last Man degradation of the bourgeois as a type that emerged in the commercial technological era. They are all ways of saying that is not me. But a No is not a Yes. Finding something to say Yes to is the real challenge. 

The security-minded bourgeois type is not the end of history; he's simply a more or less harmless placeholder until a forward-looking transcendence-seeker can emerge as a new cultural type. But while we wait for him and her to take their place as effective historical actors, we have to protect ourselves against the damage those who look to the past for their transcendence can do. There is no future in nostalgia, at least not one that any sane person would want to live in. 

Comments

[JP]

There isn't enough of a potential market for fascism because the youth cohort to whom it would appeal isn't large enough.

The generational stars can't align that way at the moment.

It's simply not a risk anytime in the near future. The neoconservatives are fading and the wars are being wound down.

The South is being the South, but that's about it. There's no risk in America that I can see. Just a lot of rhetorical sound and fury, meaning nothing because there's no driver behind it.

[Jonathan]

Aren't transcendence-seekers by definition neither forward-looking nor backward-looking? If there's no future in nostalgia, there's no future in utopianism either.

[JP]

"Aren't transcendence-seekers by definition neither forward-looking nor backward-looking? If there's no future in nostalgia, there's no future in utopianism either."

The problems with the utopians tends to be a complete ignorance of human nature.

We should be working toward a purpose, and that purpose should be "utopian" in nature, meaning tending toward "heaven on earth" however, it needs to be grown over time rather and in line with actual reality than "built in a generation" by "breaking some eggs to make an omlet".

[Jack Whelan]

Utopianism makes the error of assuming that one's fantasy future is a "program" worth fighting for. The future is something we move into step by step as either a response to grace or as a refusal of it. History is the evolution of the way these countercurrents play out.

There are things worth fighting for, and we fight for them in a spirit of hope, but we make our fight in a context defined by what is given here and now, in this moment and in this place, not in the context of some fantasy future which is "no place." We make choices in concrete historical circumstances, not abstract ones.

Ultimately we fight to preserve a human future, and the purpose of this blog has been from the beginning to think through what that means, and I do it in an open-ended spirit, one in which I am sniffing my way step by step, not in a Jacobin spirit of thinking I know better: Get on the bus or get run over by it. But whatever happens in biotechnology in the next century, the essence of the human being as a creature open to transcendence will always define his essence. And any developments that seal him off from transcendence will dehumanize him.

Perhaps a human cyborgian future is a possibility, but doubt it. Nevertheless, one of the most interesting themes in the more recent Battlestar Gallactica was its proposing that the machines, the cylons, were in fact open to transcendence in this sense, that they were in fact monotheists. It also plays with the idea that we humans are a technical creation of some earlier humans' who lived live in another galaxy and colonized earth. Who knows? All this has happened before, so to say.

I am not closed to the possibility that the humans we are now can use our technical knowledge to develop a better version of ourselves, but there would have to be a lot of things in place that are not in place now for that to happen in a deeply "human" way. In our current decadence, we do not have the spiritual or moral resources to effect choices that would make use of our technology in a positive way. But while unlikely any time soon, that could change. We could have a transforming 'renaissance' moment, and after it, things could look quite different, and possibilities hidden from us now could come into view.

[Jack Whelan]

On another more here and now theme that relates to this post, the reaction to RGIII's knee injury in the Redskins' game against the Seahawks has been interesting to me. See this piece by David Zirin in the Nation to sum it up:

http://www.thenation.com/blog/172056/rgiii-and-crisis-liberalism-united-states#

There are so many worlds crashing into one another here. There is the warrior world of the athlete where virtue is defined by disregard for one's safety and security. I haven't heard any athlete or coach say it was wrong to keep him in the game. There's the safety-minded bourgeois world of sports writers and fans, who think that Shanahan was mean for caring about winning more than caring about the health and safety of his player. There is the capitalist world of the owner who is being criticized for being too cheap to provide a decent field and so jeopardizes his own assets.

And nobody's talking about all the people who would be criticizing both Shanahan and RGIII if in fact he was taken out of the game before he blew out his knee, and the Redskins went on to lose. Then all the bourgeois writers would be asking for both of their scalps for being such wimps.

If it were me in Shanahan's place, I'd like to think I'd have enough sense to take him out because he just wasn't effective after the first quarter because of his hurt, but not yet blown out knee, but given the warrior mentality that dominates that world, that would have been difficul. And I have to say that I admire RGIII for not calculating what was in his personal career interests by risking his knee in the way he did. Most of the blame lies with Snyder. That field was a national embarrassment. It's taken down three star players--Adrian Peterson, RGIII, and a star Seahawk player, Chris Clemmons, on Sunday. They should all take off their warrior hats now and put on their\ bourgeois capitalist ones now and sue him.

[JP]

" But whatever happens in biotechnology in the next century, the essence of the human being as a creature open to transcendence will always define his essence. And any developments that seal him off from transcendence will dehumanize him.

Perhaps a human cyborgian future is a possibility, but doubt it."

There are certain technologies that could potentially be developed that are somewhat problematic.

The immortality project of the technological utopians is analogous to what Tomberg was talking about with respect to reincarnation in his Meditations.

I haven't seen the technological utopians making any progress on this front and I'm not about to help them.

They are completely missing the point of what they are trying to do, which is just fine with me. As long as they are going down the wrong path, they won't get to where they want to go.

The entire cyborg issue is kind of amusing because I have a pretty good sense of the issues involved.

The biotech revolution is most helpful in *healing* problems as opposed to *engineering* new technology. Let's clean up the genome and go from there.

We *know* what we are doing with respect to that. Healing certain genetic conditions is clearly good, so we need to work in that direction.

[geciktirme spreyi]

The biotech revolution is most helpful in *healing* problems as opposed to *engineering* new technology. Let's clean up the genome and go from there.