/263/ The Useless Past (2) ft. Matt karp
Added 2022-05-10 06:03:00 +0000 UTC[Patreon Exclusive]
On History and futurelessness.
We continue our discussion with Matthew Karp about his essay, "History As End: 1619, 1776, and the politics of the past", and ask whether anyone has a "golden age" anymore. What is the properly progressive attitude towards history?
In the After Party, the boys debate the woke reconstruction of the past; how this relates to a ear of the future; and whether conservatism today is just trolling the libs.
And we finish with a big one: does the return of History require a sustained engagement with the contradictions of the past, or instead a Year Zero in which we rethink freedom from scratch?
Readings:
- History As End: 1619, 1776, and the politics of the past, Matt Karp, Harpers
- Ends in Sight: Marx/Fukuyama/Hobsbawm/Anderson, Gregory Elliott
- The End of the End of History, Bungacast
Comments
Really interesting, thanks
Aufhebunga Bunga
2022-05-17 23:39:39 +0000 UTCI really enjoyed this -- in terms of how to use the past, also with regards to statues, I do think one needs an ethical framework to sensibly discuss. I make this point in this article on Stalin's Museum in Georgia (Caucasus), if that is of interest to anyone http://bit.ly/Ethics-PolComm-Gori
Hans Gutbrod
2022-05-17 09:18:37 +0000 UTCGood thought, but then it all leads back to the "Repetition Compulsion" episode. This is a kind of liberalism that cannot accept there are perverse effects of liberalism itself, so it's constantly trying to vomit up what it perceives as a non-liberal kernel stuck in its throat, then re-digest it in the form of repeated liberal revolutions against perceived ancien regimes (racism, whiteness, colonialism, men, whatever). On the other side, weirdly enough, you get the people who explicitly want to carry on a "Western civilization" frankly admitting that liberalism has perverse effects.
Eli S
2022-05-13 20:46:18 +0000 UTCStray thought: throughout the augties and the 2010s western anglo-led liberalism was "provincialized" by a variety of non-western and/or anti-colonial thinkers--from mainline wokesters within the west all the way to Dugin, for instance.--who argued that actually globalist liberalism/technocapitalism isn't a universal project; it's an anglo/western european "civilizational" project (almost in a spenglerian sense), and that it's irredeemably corrupt at the metaphysical level. i.e. racism is inherently a core component of the western/anglo project and worldview. The 1619 project is part of an effort to "re-universalize" liberalism, to digest the traumas inflicted by the provincializing critiques. Fundamentally this is incoherent and contradictory and evidence of a world-system in decline, scrambling to maintain coherence in the face of real ideological and geopolitical challenges from outside.
plechazunga
2022-05-11 20:47:53 +0000 UTC
