By Jurek Molnar
The idea that history is linear and moves on a steady path of progression.
Progressive man, on the other hand, looks back to a most imperfect beginning. The beginning is barbarism, stupidity, rudeness, extreme scarcity. Progressive man does not feel that he has lost something of great, not to say infinite, importance; he has lost only his chains.
Leo Strauss, Progress or Return?
1
The most fundamental act of civilisation is to set time frames. The majority of ancient civilisations thought in cyclical time patterns, which meant that the experience of time was cut into seasons and seasons necessarily repeat. The reliable recurrence of seasons guaranteed economic survival and hence supported the development of powerful cultural artefacts. The certainty of given time frames, their constant iterative nature, made civilisation possible, while the break of these patterns led to catastrophe and civilisation’s collapse. Life is cyclical, and so is history.
The perspective of all past civilisations on the experience of time was that tomorrow will not be much different from yesterday. All ideas of bequeathing one’s wealth, craft and culture to the next generation depend on that simple prospect. Time and geography were largely the same, as Oswald Spengler explored in “The decline of the West” (1918). In his theory of how civilisations rise and fall, the experience of history matched the experience of geography. Things do not change significantly, or at least they change at such a slow pace that human beings do not notice during their life spans. Spengler explained that civilisations became stable and enduring by a metaphysical connection between the human mind and the geography that surrounded it. Soul and soil are hence intrinsically linked. Civilisation, in Spengler’s understanding, is another name for the emotional bond that ties people to the specific piece of land they live in. The reliable characteristics of rivers, seas, mountains, valleys, forests, deserts, prairies and planes established the ability in human brains to master the fear of the unknown and to sustain the vastness of space. The imaginations of humans had to be constrained by external and internal boundaries against the destructive experience of infinite expansion. What we call civilisation is in Spengler’s theory the system of borders, the limitation of the vast space, which enables human cultures to flourish. Spengler’s philosophy of history declared that all civilisations follow the same pattern: they rise, they prosper, and they inevitably fall. They are specifically tied to a certain place in space and time, which determines their culture, their memories and their vision of the world they inhabit. History repeats itself in this regard constantly. History is indeed a cycle, not a linear trajectory.
Most readers will certainly recognize that such a perspective is alien to most of us today. As moderns (or post-moderns) we certainly think of time and history not as cyclical, but as a straight path in linear growth. One can also say that “wokeness” as a cultural phenomenon has an explicit progressive understanding of history: history moves forward without looking back. In a certain sense we are all progressives, concerning the trajectory of historical transformation. History goes forward and is in constant improvement of an imperfect past. In this line of thinking, the past has nothing to offer in terms of knowledge and wisdom. It is either laughable backwardness or horrendous abuse, which has to be mocked for its errors, damned for its failures and ruthlessly exploited for entertainment purposes. It contains no truth of its own, it is not a source of moral exhortation and it does not teach us anything important, except how not to do things. References to the past become mostly a rejection of the past. But we never ask ourselves how ancient Egyptians, Roman citizens or contemporaries of the 18th century would have judged our way of life today. Would they appreciate our architecture? Would they think positively of our art? Would they agree that sexual liberation is a goal in itself? Leopold von Ranke famously wrote: “Every age stands equal before God!”
As moderns (or post-moderns) we live in the present, as if this present was the ocean, while actually it is a small pond. As progressives we do not treat the ages equally, we are consciously racist against all others to give an unfair advantage to our own. If the past cannot tell us anything substantial, then every form of knowledge is the expression of an experience that lives in the present and nowhere else. When there is no history to refer (positively) to, then the present becomes the single source of judgement. Everything that is now must necessarily be better than what came before. It is certainly no coincidence that the fashion industry has become so massive. If there is a word that describes this attitude best, then it would be the term “fashionism”. “Fashionism” is basically the dominant ideological perspective of what today is understood as history, but its origins are neither contemporary nor in any way an invention of the modern era. The idea that history is linear comes from a specific tradition of Protestantism, which in the Anglo-Saxon world is known as Whig history. The differences and conflicts between “Whigs” and “Tories” starting in the late 17th century, resemble in many ways our contemporary distinctions between liberal and conservative, left and right, progressive and reactionary. “Wokeness” aka progressivism is in its ideological core the bastard child of late 17th century English Whig Protestantism, which has infiltrated Marxism and other left-wing ideologies and not as many contemporaries have argued the other way around. Karl Marx was after all a man, whose father converted from Judaism to the Protestant faith. What Marx brought into the idea of socialism besides a very intense analysis of capitalist production, is most of all a terminology of history and historical progress that takes the form of metaphysical laws and teleological determinations. Communism, Marx stated, is the goal of history, in which the bourgeois era and its extension of capitalist exploitation is a necessary, but transitional phase. Hegelianism, which is the blueprint of Marxist philosophy stated like the “Whigs” a teleological goal of history, a movement of the world spirit towards absolute knowledge. Hegel’s principle conviction was that the world gets more reasonable and strives for more wisdom. Hegel and his philosophy would deserve a more thorough argument, but for the uninterested observer this just exemplifies the modern tendency to think in linear teleological frames. Progressive thought is strictly bound to this principle.
All teleological constructs are either utopian or apocalyptic, or sometimes, although this is rare, they employ both characteristics. Evangelical branches, which departed from mainline Protestantism often tended to declare an eschatological end of times scenario, in which only a few righteous believers will survive Armageddon. We find this idea in all kinds of political expressions, which pretend to be secular, but are in their origins hopelessly infested with religious beliefs. The struggle about climate change is not that the climate changes, but that most ideological arguments concerning climate change are inevitably catastrophic and apocalyptic. Most struggles about the scientific validity of this subject are a matter of faith. It is a perfectly reasonable thing to say that climate change will have all sorts of effects on global civilisation in the next centuries, but it is religious eschatology to declare that the world will burn in 2050 if fossil fuels are not completely abandoned. The unacknowledged religious intent of modern eschatological politics hides behind a façade that, in the words of Chesterton, pretends to be secular, worldly and practical. But this leads us to a deeper underlying problem.
The experience of time has definitely changed. The perception of time among all our ancestors was dominated by large scales. People before the 1900s thought that the shortest period of time is at least an hour or even more widely a day, and before that people of agricultural societies were mostly concerned by the passing of seasons. They certainly did not waste their attention on seconds or even fraction of seconds. The constant decrease of time spans, the way we learn to cut time in our most inner experience is one of the most underrated psychological factors, we need to grasp, if we want to understand our time and ourselves. Technological progress has dramatically split our own perception of time into constantly shorter amounts. Real time communication radically reduces individual attention spans to a point near zero. Time is out of joint. In a progressive, “woke” world, time has become an extremely condensed presence, a singularity which sucks everything in and has no connection to history, past or future. Expectations of cause and effect have become extremely narrow, so meaningful actions are generally expected to have immediate results. The emphasis on “lived experience”, which excludes all non-subjective points of view, renders all historic knowledge as “dead experience”. The strange relationship of “wokeness” to history is to abandon historic knowledge as a source of guidance and direction and to replace it with an ideology that focuses solely on the split second. The term “instant gratification” is the key to understand, why the experience of time has become increasingly impatient. Technological progress escalates the experience of time and shortens the spans between request and response dramatically. Real time communications are actually killing time. The experience of time is compressed to extreme actuality, and so instant gratification becomes the key to hold prestige. “Now” is the most important word of our era. “Wokeness” favours fashionable ideas, as we have established before and “fashion” as a phenomenon can only refer to a radical presence, one that has no other vision of time at all. Fashion is “now”, hence “fashionism” becomes the leading ideology. History in “woke” times then is the idea that the presence has to control, even change the past (and implicitly the future) in order to justify the political imperatives of the present. No matter what you were told in school, Cleopatra was black.
In a “woke” society, history is not actively abandoned, but simply forgotten. The focus on the presence tends to constant repetition, a permanent cycle of oblivion, which bores itself to death. What we have created in terms of civilisation is not a society, but a memory hole. The mass effect of short attention spans is a cultural amnesia, which has become an “epistemological obstacle” (Gaston Bachelard). The access to cultural memory is blocked by a powerful mechanism, that replaces identity rooted in historical memory with momentary online consumer fantasies (aka pornography). The struggle about identities and their subjective nature is the direct result of a society in which historic memory has become meaningless. The amnesia is something that cannot be addressed directly, it has to be overcome by pushing the boundaries of the focus on the presence. “Fashionism” can be only countered by metaphysics, the idea that reality as we perceive it, has necessarily limits of its own and that reality hence goes beyond the limits of our individual, scientific or epistemological perceptions.
In a spectacular feature series on Netflix, the notorious Graham Hancock leads us through eight episodes, in which he gives an alternative explanation for the existence of ancient artefacts around the world. There are pyramids, temples, fortresses, caves and abandoned subterranean cities around the globe, which consists of enormous stones and heavy material, built in a way, moderns would have great trouble to repeat and nearly all of them were carved with precision only modern tools should provide. Hancock has a very interesting theory for all of this: a global catastrophe, most likely a series of floods caused by a meteor rain, which hit the earth at the end of the last ice age, destroyed an ancient technologically quite sophisticated civilisation. Due to the scale of the cataclysmic event, we have no knowledge and memory of its existence. The survivors of the catastrophe sent out messengers, which appeared as mythological founders of several ancient cultures all around the world and inspired or directly built artefacts, which all had some connection to astronomy and were erected to watch the skies for warning signs. Very interesting examples of such artefacts are the remains of Ġgantija in Malta, the structures of Göbekli Tepe in Turkey or the Great Pyramid of Cholula in Mexico. Hancock can comfortably point to the fact that several cultures, completely disconnected to each other, have told stories about great floods and similar catastrophes in their mythological records. While Hancock’s thesis seems very speculative sometimes, he poses a lot of interesting questions, which need to be answered before dismissing his theories out of hand. One of his basic assumptions, which caught me, was his idea that our culture suffers from a strange form of amnesia, which refuses to accept the existence of a culture equal to our own in its global scale, around 15.000 years ago. And while I cannot say for sure this is true, I am certainly not dismissing the possibility that the perceptions of our ancient historical record is flawed. Hancock has a point when he questions the timelines of traditional historic science, which relies mostly on written records and inscriptions to give reasonable dates, when and how something was built from heavy stone. If such sources are unavailable, speculation must replace knowledge. Nobody knows for instance when (and most importantly how) the caves of Longyou or the Javan temple of Borobudur were built, since not a single historical record mentions their existence. Hancock, despite the venom that is often directed against him, insists on the idea that history is cyclical and that our perception of history is flawed as long as we draw straight linear trajectories, which point to us contemporary humans as the maximum value. Only in such environments Vikings can appear as “non-binary”.
2
As uninterested observers we do not need a full-blown theory of history to make a point. There are several theories of history available, but our own definition goes as follows: history is the idea, that human beings of the greater past (let’s say the last 10 000 years) are in terms of biology and genetics not very different from us, while their specific circumstances, narratives and cultural habits are radically distinct. History, in short, is the unity of the human spirit in a diversity of experience. Our bodily self-conscience and our emotions are roughly the same as they were thousands of years ago, but our emphasis and selection of emotional responses are very different. Meaning changes much faster than genetic inheritance. Our basic brain chemistry is probably not very different from that of humans 10 000 years ago, but the intensity of request and response cycles to various evolutionary and cultural challenges have altered our minds unknown to past generations. History, or at least accurate history, is the understanding of the past by looking at given events through the lens of the past. We do not gain much information, when we judge past events by our own values and metrics. That would be “fashionism”.
Our advantage as contemporaries is the simple ability to distinguish between the intentions and the results. We can assess the facts that are known and determine the intentions by which these facts were created. All known historic events were advertised by elites, who decided how these events should be passed on to future generations. But under this pretext, the accurate history of intentions is nothing less than the identification of propaganda. We usually use this word in a derogatory way, because we only think of bad propaganda, most of all political advertisement we reject as false, incoherent and untruthful. But there is also very good propaganda, we choose not to consider as immoral or parse as disinformation. Many pieces of the finest art were built for propaganda purposes, like Sergey Eisenstein’s film Battleship Potemkin (1925), the Athenian Parthenon sculptures (447BC to 432BC), Edward Elgar’s “Pomp and Circumstances” (1901) or Martin Luther’s German translation of the Bible (1534). The highest art may originally be conceived for propaganda purposes, which remains invisible to the contemporary eye, when the passage of time has rendered all of the struggles involved meaningless or at least unimportant. The great Dante Alighieri for instance wrote around 1313 a treatise, called “De Monarchia” in which he intervened in a power struggle between the Italian pope and the German emperor, making a case for his donors, the Ghibellines of Florence, who were loyal to the emperor against the papacy. It is clearly not his best work, now almost completely forgotten and nobody alive today cares at all about the battles between Guelphs and Ghibellines in some late medieval Italian city states. When we look at historical events, wars and conflicts, which happened a few centuries or even millennia ago, we rarely get emotional. Is anybody still aroused by the “war of the roses” and defends the case of Lancaster against York as a personal agenda? Does anyone take sides in the 30 Years War and heats up while preparing a glaring speech for counter reformation in the Holy Roman Empire against the heresies of Protestantism?
We look at these historic events sometimes as art, sometimes as legend and sometimes as trivia, but not as propaganda. We only use this term if we have a personal connection to the conflict or at least an interest in the subject, which demands from us to be a partisan. Propaganda appeals to our emotions and when the emotions have vanished, the struggles have ended and the conflicts have disappeared, nobody cares about the reasons any more, when studying the factual outcome. We often look at cultural artefacts and do not recognise the actual context, often very profane propaganda purposes, they were built, painted, written or composed for. This is actually the subject of history: to make reasonable judgments about the facts, when the emotion is gone.
In 1751 the British artist William Hogarth published a series of prints, which established him as one of the most important artists of his time and guaranteed him a spot in the pantheon of Western art. When I was 10 years old, I saw his works Beer Street and Gin Lane the first time in a book about pirates. The book, simply titled “The Pirates”, (and also known as “The Seafarers”) was the German translation of a Time-Life edition, written by the explorer and journalist Douglas Botting in 1978. I was very interested in pirates at the time and was fascinated by all sorts of historical details. Botting describes the circumstances of naval service, the living conditions of sailors and the politics of marine commerce with a high regard for the brutal hardships average sea men had to endure during these times. The book is a classic and one of the most interesting historical accounts on the subject. In order to give a hint on the social conditions, which could picture the misery and poverty of the times that drove people into piracy, Botting included art of the 17th and 18th century, the works of Hogarth among them. Gin Lane struck me immediately. Hogarth did not paint on a canvas, but used sharp tools to draw his picture into a metal plate, so these lines could then be filled with ink and pressed against a piece of paper. In Gin Lane an enormous number of interesting stories take place, which all circle around the topic of alcoholism and its dire social consequences. The main protagonist in the foreground is an ugly woman, completely drunk, who loses her baby on the staircase, freezing the moment the poor child falls into his death. I remember that I had dreams back then as a 10-year-old, where I desperately tried to catch the baby and spare the infant his tragic demise. To this day, the picture remains one of the most impressing works of art I have ever seen. Only recently, when I looked for some context of Hogarth and his work, I became aware of the real story that led to the creation of these artefacts.
Hogarth was commissioned to produce a series of prints to promote the so-called Gin Act, which was already put into legislation in 1736. Beer Street and Gin Lane are meant to be viewed alongside each other. Beer Street paints a positive picture of people who happily consume domestically brewed beer (and sexually harass women), while Gin Lane demonstrates the extreme social decay of a society which is addicted to foreign distilled Gin. The import of cheap and turpentine stretched booze was not only the cause of a larger social crisis, it harmed the domestic industry, which decided to advertise its products more aggressively. The whole purpose of Gin Lane and Beer Street was simply to promote the domestic brands of alcoholic beverages against the low-cost competition from abroad. One can imagine a more contemporary version, where the damage of foreign made fentanyl-based drugs is contrasted to the advantages of domestically produced heroine. Both pictures of Hogarth were nothing else than marketing schemes of corporate interests, which tried to protect their revenues.
Did this revelation diminish my appreciation for Hogarth? Not at all. It made the drama of Gin Lane even more interesting. First of all, there was a real crisis, which affected the poor disproportionately and accelerated crime rates into new extremes. The situation of the drunken woman who accidentally killed her child, while being possessed by poisonous liquor looks as real as contemporary scenes from American inner cities. Nearly every little scene that is visible on Hogarth’s print has a chance to come from a real-life experience. He must have seen or witnessed similar events and only condensed them for artistic (or propagandist) reasons into one powerful piece of art, which hasn’t lost its emotional tension since I first saw it as a 10-year-old. Are these pictures propaganda? Yes, they are. Are these prints great works of art? Absolutely. Both statements are true and the artistic value of Hogarth’s work has increased, since the reason for its commission has no relevance for us anymore. If Gin Lane and Beer Street are propaganda, they are at least very good and artistically valuable propaganda. Or in other words: history does not repeat itself, but it comes in cycles, where basic conflicts of the human conditions express in ever changing variations. Gin Lane and Beer Street are not just moments of a bygone era, they look back at us and ask some uncomfortable questions, whether things have really changed so much. And this should be our most important response to the challenge of history: the past is never gone, it constantly returns and demonstrates how powerful our own deceptions are.
