Sultan Knish
All politics are the politics of the future. The one cause that we all
champion, regardless of our political orientation, is the cause of the
future. All that we fight for is the ability to shape the future.
The fundamental political question is, "Do you believe things are
getting better or worse?" Ruling parties tend to answer, "Better",
opposition parties tend to answer, "Worse". The deeper answer to that
question though lies in our perceptions of the past and the future.
The left tends to view the past negatively and future shock positively.
It wants change to disrupt the old order of things in order to make way
for a new order. It hews to a progressive understanding of history in
which we have been getting better with the advance of time, the march of
progress mimics evolution as a means of lifting humanity out of the
muck and raising it up on ivory towers of reason through a ceaseless
process of change.
The right often views the past positively, it sees change as a destroyer
that undermines civilization's accomplishments and threatens to usher
in anarchy. It fights to conserve that which is threatened by the
entropic winds of change. The conservative worldview is progressive in
its own way, but it is the progress of the established order. It sees
progress emerging from the accretion of civilization, rather than from
the disruption of revolution.
Where the left tends to be unrealistically optimistic about the future,
acting like a child running to the edge and jumping off, without
remembering all the bumps and bruises before, the right tends to be
pessimistic about the future. It tends to be wary of change because it
is all too aware of how dangerous change can be.
Youth who do not understand the value of what is around them rush to the
left. As they achieve a sense of worth, of the world around them and of
their labors, they drift slowly to the right. Age also brings with it a
sense of vulnerability. Knowing how you can be hurt, how fragile the
thin skin of the body, the fleshy connections and organs dangling
within, brings with it a different view of the world. Once you
understand that you can lose and that you will lose, then you also
understand how important it is to defend what you have left.
The vital mantra of the left is do something for the sake of doing
something. Change for the sake of novelty. Action for the sake of
action. This carnival drumbeat loses its appeal when you come to
understand how dangerous change can be. Personal history becomes
national history becomes personal history again as you live through it.
Seeing what a mistake change can be as you watch politicians disgraced,
causes revealed as fool's errands and crusades fall apart, is a great
teacher of the folly of change for the sake of change.
Reagan's question, "Are you better off than you were four years ago?" is
the fundamental challenge of the conservative that asks whether the
change was really worth it. It is the question at the heart of the
struggle between the right and the left.
Are you better off than you were twenty years ago or forty years ago?
It's an uncomfortable question because it has no simple answer. In some
ways we are better off and in some ways we are worse off. Examining the
question points us to the sources of the problem. The places where the
tree has grown wrong, the branches that have to be pruned so that it may
live.
The power of this question is that it challenges the narrative of
change. It asks us to examine that most basic premise that change is
good. But beyond the narrative tangles of those in power and those out
of power, is the larger echo of that question which asks whether the
world overall is becoming a better or worse place.
This question has deeper resonances. Is history a wheel or a rocket
shooting up to the stars? Are we on an inevitable evolutionary
trajectory rising up or are we doomed to repeat dark ages, progress and
then dark ages again? Beneath all the speculations and theorizing is the
grim question, what becomes of us? Not us individually, but our
societies, our nations, our civilizations, our accomplishments and our
way of life.
If
you assign no value to the past, then the question hardly matters. Who
really cares about the Western Canon, if the only aspect of literature
that matters is its relevance to present day social problems? Such a
literature by definition has no past or future. Only the throbbing
political pulse of the present. What do the Dutch Masters matter if
painting is merely a tool for challenging notions of color, order and
space? What does the American Revolution matter if blacks did not have
the right to vote? Why should anyone pay attention to the Magna Carta
when it didn't cover gay rights?
Change measures the past against the potential of the future as embodied
in the strivings of the present and finds it wanting. It does not
recognize that it emerges from the past and is defined by it, rather it
is always fleeing the past, casting it off, tossing it aside and running
breathlessly toward the future. For those who want a single explanation
for the Jewish liberal, it is to be noted that political liberalism is
an aspect of the rejection of traditionalism. Those who break their ties
with the past, escaping the shadows of what seems to be a dark past, to
eat of the lotus of an idyllic future, are always running, afraid of
what might be following behind them.
The left destroys its future by breaking with the past in search of the
future. Like a fish out of the water or a tree with no roots, it
perishes and becomes a meal for passing predators. It conceives of
futures that have no link with the past and ruthlessly strives to
implement them over piles of corpses. It fails to understand that the
past is neither good or bad, but a mix of the two that has been tested
and refined by struggle and conflict. The future will have both good and
bad in it as well, but the more it breaks with the past, the more it
will be untested and unrefined.
Change has both positive and negative aspects to it, which is why leaps
of hope and change are dangerous. When you jump without looking, without
understanding that there are sharp edges, then bad things are more
likely to happen. If the right proceeds too cautiously into the future,
blinded by a rosy vision of the past, the left rushes too heedlessly
forward, mistaking darkness for light.
The left romanticises chaos, while the right romanticises order. But the
left's chaos necessitates a harsher order as the chaos it unleashes is
managed with higher and higher levels of social authorities that enforce
their perfect plan for change on the formless society bubbling under
them. The right's order allows for less authority because it depends on
empowering organic social institutes and mores, rather than enforcing a
detailed plan that goes against the grain.
The right's organic order allows for freer societies because it stems
from how people actually live. It is rooted in the past, rather than an
ever-changing plan for the future. The left's artificial order makes for
societies that are fundamentally repressive, even when they allow for a
limited degree of autonomy, because the hand of the planners is always
on every man and woman.
Repressive societies on the right are bottom up, they represent the
preferred order of the people, but while the left chants of the will of
the people, their repressive societies represent only the master plan of
an elite. The right builds such societies to foreclose change, the left
builds its societies to implement change, but once that happens, their
societies freeze, turn reactionary and fall apart as they no longer have
any reason to exist, but to perpetuate the power of the elite.
The right sees positive change as organic, deriving from the inevitable
trajectory of a civilization, the left sees positive change as
revolutionary, the result of the dispossessed fighting the possessors
until the former triumph and the latter yield. This view of history is
dangerously childish and violent, but it has become our version of
history and it demands that we constantly sacrifice ourselves on the
altar of change for the sake of emerging groups of the dispossessed.
For the right, change is life. For the left it is death. It demands the
death of societies and people, of nations and beliefs, it is a beast
that is constantly hungry for blood, always baying with outrage at the
moon. For the right change brings continuity, for the left, utopia. It
is this utopia that they worship at the altar of change. This Moloch of
hope and fairy cloaked dreams scribbled on scraps of notepaper, signs
and slogans which scream that if you want a better world badly enough,
then sheer outraged optimism will bring it about.
The old order must die, says the left, for a better world to be born.
Sooner or later we must all mount the altar of change and let our blood
drip beneath the shaman's knife, so that the green world may renew
itself. Some must be euthanized, others aborted, we must pay more and
give more, we must volunteer and donate our times, our lives and our
minds to the new order. Our beliefs, our nations and our children, these
too we must offer up to the fire.
And when all of it has been burned away, everything but our dream of a
perfect world, then the gleaming new world will emerge out of the ashes,
a world too wonderful for us to look at. And if that world seems like a
dark age, where savages prowl the streets, knives are sharp, services
are lacking and there is a man with a whip on every corner, that is
because we are too reactionary, too full of the old world to see the
glory of the new world for what it is. To rejoice in its bestial scream,
to dance mindlessly as the ages are swept away beneath the dead moon
while the ashes of burning books and paintings rain down on us and
civilization is rubble under our bleeding feet.
Better or worse? It all comes down to how much you have to lose.
Below
the breakdancers spin and tumble enjoying the first days of spring. A
bad drummer by the fountain persistently whacks away providing a
dissonant soundtrack to the yuppies toting bags full of supposedly
organic groceries from the stalls of the farmers' market.
My bottom line on same-sex marriage (SSM) as a political issue is that recognizing it will inevitably be a misuse of government. It is especially a misuse of national government. States have more latitude to indulge in governmental malpractice, because the rights of citizens are properly backstopped at the federal level. If a state has infringed citizens’ rights by doing something misguided, a federal read on the Constitution should adjust the problem. But the national government must remain limited in its scope for mucking around in the people’s lives, in large part because there is no appeal above it.