Several months ago I announced that I was going to post a piece entitled "1848". It's probably not going to happen, but my reason for it was that I saw it as the year that the music died, so to say, the year that materialism and disenchantment became the dominant motif in the West.
When I was younger I mostly thought this was a bad thing, but now I see it as an inevitable or even as a necessary thing. I think it's important as a stage in anyone's spiritual development that they see reality and all the ways it's shot through with evil and brutishness and yet to remain hopeful. I've written before here about how the early modern St. John of the Cross was a harbinger in writing about his own spiritual development about what we would go through collectively as dark nights of spirit, soul, and senses. After 1848 the Dark Night began in the West.
Delusional, optimistic, naive, utopian thinking lingered until World War I among certain factions within the West's cultural elite, but already by 1848 the new cultural OS had been installed, and it had purged romantic notions of spiritual dimensions shaping history. My essay "Metaxis" discusses this theme in greater detail. Hegel dialectics of spirit became Marx's dialects of matter, and about ten years later Darwin's publication of the Origin of the Species provided a basis for Huxley, Spencer, and the development of ontological naturalism as the culture's new dominating (if not quite yet dominant) metanarrative that sealed the deal.
Thereafter any arguments that history was anything more than a random, purposeless struggle for survival seemed silly and medieval. But surely once a civilization loses all sense of spiritual aspiration, it ceases to be a civilization. It's been the argument of this blog that our current social reality is not civilization, but a wintertime of the spirit, a wandering in the dead land, the wilderness, a decadent interlude, which we must endure in hope while we wait for spring.
And so for the last year or so I've been trying to understand the how this winter came upon us, and if understanding its nature might lead to some understanding about how to look for and cultivate the early signs of spring. I've been spending time reading about 19th Century as much as I had time for it--mostly Eric Hobsbawm's "Age of" books. And I feel that while I don't have a specialist's grasp of what happened, I do have a very good understanding of the main economic, cultural, and political developments from the American and French Revolutions through to World War II.
But knowing what happened is not the same as understanding it, and I need some help in understanding that, and since in a wintertime of the spirit, there is no such thing as a philosophy of history, one is force to embrace people of a philosophical cast of mind who think about history, and such a person is Karl Polanyi. I've just started 1944 book, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time, which has been on my reading list for some time. I wanted to read Wm. James and maybe Peirce this summer, but that will have to wait, because Polanyi is more in the flow of what I've been thinking about the last year.
So this is my summer project. I've just finished reading the first two chapters, and I invite readers here who have read Polanyi or may have had him on their list too to work with me as I read through it. My family health issues are a little more stable, but not completely resolved, so my posting here still might be a little spotty.
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Polanyi understands that something really big happened in the 19th century, which wasn't all that long ago, and that we still don't understand it very well. He's writing from the perspective of the middle of WWII, but I don't know that we've learned much about what happened since he wrote about it, especially considering the developments of the last thirty years:
To trace the institutional mechanism of the downfall of a civilization may well appear as a hopeless endeavor. Yet it is this we are undertaking. In doing so, we are consciously adjusting our aim to the extreme singularity of the subject matter. For the civilization of the nineteenth century was unique precisely in that it centered on a definite institutional mechanism.
No explanation can satisfy which does not account for the suddenness of the cataclysm. As if the forces of change had been pent up for a century, a torrent of events is pouring down on mankind. A social transformation of planetary range is being topped by wars of an entirely new type in which a score of states have crashed, and the contours of new empires are emerging out of a sea of blood. But this fact of demoniac violence is merely superimposed on a swift, silent current of change which swallows up the past often without so much as a ripple on the surface! A reasoned analysis of the catastrophe must account both for the tempestuous action and the quiet dissolution. (p. 4)
What is this institutional mechanism? It's the self-adjusting market of 19th Century Liberalism and the complex of institutions that became subservient to it from the Concert of Europe, to the gold standard, to the great international banking houses:
Our thesis is that the idea of a self-adjusting market implied a stark utopia. Such an institution could not exist for any length of time without annihilating the human and natural substance of society; it would have physically destroyed man and transformed his surroundings into a wilderness. Inevitably, society took measures to protect itself, but whatever measures it took impaired the self-regulation of the market, disorganized industrial life, and thus endangered society in yet another way. It was this dilemma which forced the development of the market system into a definite groove and finally disrupted the social organization based upon it. (p. 3-4)
I find it interesting that he thinks that the changes that came in the 1930s and 40s as a response to the cataclysm were a permanent:
But if the breakdown of our civilization was timed by the failure of world economy, it was certainly not caused by it. Its origins lay more than a hundred years back in that social and technological upheaval from which the idea of a self-regulating market system sprang in Western Europe. The end of this venture has come in our time; it closes a distinct stage in the history of industrial civilization. (p.5)
Has this stage in industrial civilization dominated by the unregulated market come to an end? Until the mid 90s I would have agreed with this statement, but the resurgence of 19th Century Liberalism in the Libertarian and Neoliberal ideologies that dominate American and world political elites since the 80s shows that the lessons that Polanyi thinks we learned apparently have not been learned.
That we have traded material prosperity for spiritual poverty is basically a conservative argument, at least an argument made by thoughtful conservatives. I agree with conservatives in this regard. I disagree, however, that this was a mistake. I embrace it, as suggested above, as a necessary stage in the spiritual evolution of humankind. I also disagree with conservatives who think that the State is necessarily the enemy--it can be, for sure. But the depredations of powerful actors in the private sector have been and will continue to be more destructive of the quality of our lives if left unchecked, and the only checking mechanism we little people have is our collective political will to push back against the predators through our political institutions. The cataclysms dating from 1914 through to 1945 taught our grandparents and parents a lesson that Polanyi thought we had learned, but apparently not. I hope we won't have to go through similar cataclysms in order to understand what he and they did.
More as I continue with my reading.