Notes from the Underground

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I tolerate this century, but I don't enjoy it.

All of the ephemera that is far too trivial to be bothered with elsewhere on this site or, depending on your point of view, a meta-commentary on it. This ephemera includes, but is not limited to art, music and literature. Most of the content here will be discussed in terms that are as abstract as possible, reality being a singularly overrated concept.

Saturday, August 13, 2005

 
Sometime ago, I came across a piece by Tristam Hunt, arguing that the counter-factual genre represented an inherently conservative view of history, in that it privileged notions of individual initiative over deeper forces of socio-economic change. Now Slavoj Zizek has written on the same subject:

"Why is the flourishing genre of ‘what if?’ histories the preserve of conservative historians? The introduction to such volumes typically begins with an attack on Marxists, who allegedly believe in historical determinism. Take this latest instalment, edited by Andrew Roberts, who has himself contributed an essay on the bright prospects that would have faced Russia in the 20th century had Lenin been shot on arriving at the Finland Station...

Roberts ignores the central ideological paradox of modern history, as formulated by Max Weber in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. In contrast to Catholicism, which conceived of human redemption as being dependent on good deeds, Protestantism insisted on predestination: why then did Protestantism function as the ideology of early capitalism? Why did people’s belief that their redemption had been decided in advance not only not lead to lethargy, but sustain the most powerful mobilisation of human resources ever experienced?"


Zizek makes a number of valid points, noting that the communist left required some notion of individual scenarios precisely in order to effect the Russian revolution (since Marx had supposed that only capitalist societies would be ripe for revolution while a fedalist society like Russia would have to become a captialist state first). As a recent spat of comments on this blog demonstrated, much hard-left thinking deals with the possibility of a communist society that was constructed in the manner Marx indicated rather than having being perverted by Lenin; not a proposition I agree with but nonetheless its difficult to conclude that wish-fulfillment is solely the province of the right (what if Trotsky had replaced Lenin rather than Stalin, for example?). Equally, it could be argued that counter-factual fiction has more commonly reflected a whig view of history, with both Pavane and Bring the Jubilee reflect changes that were aberrations from a idea of history as progress.

One further issue, is that much of modern conservatism strikes me as having a rather limited approach to the idea of individual agency, due to much if it having embraced a form of determinism that is considerably more rigid than anything proposed by Marx (whose writing was after all concerned with little more than alternative means of social and economic organisation) whether that applies to Fukuyama's End of History or Pinker's The Blank Slate.

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posted by Richard 2:36 pm

Thursday, April 15, 2004

 
I've always rather liked the idea of counter-factuals (i.e. what if alternative versions of history), largely because it seems to me that understanding what didn't happen is often as important as what did happen. So, I was rather struck by this critique of counter-factuals:

"It is surely the interaction between individual choices and historical context which is what governs the events of the past. As Karl Marx put it: "People make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given, and transmitted from the past." ... It is no surprise that progressives rarely involve themselves [with what if history], since implicit in it is the contention that social structures and economic conditions do not matter. Man is, we are told, a creature free of almost all historical constraints, able to make decisions on his own volition. According to Andrew Roberts, we should understand that "in human affairs anything is possible."


Accordingly, counter-factuals are seen as a preserve of the right, creating a narrative based on the actions of great men rather than of economic and technological forces. Of course, there is always a continuum in such things; only the most doctrinaire would deny a role to human agency in the face of wider forces or vice versa. But I must admit I became more favourable to this critique after reading an article by Victor Davis Hanson (who has contributed pieces to some of the counter factual books I have), imagining what if President Carter had responded with military action against Iran in 1979, comparing the actual events to the appeasement of Hitler and opposing them to the collapse of the Soviet Union at the hands of the Reagan doctrine. Firstly, this assumes that these are the correct analogies for present circumstances; it could as easily be argued that Vietnam is a better analogy than Munich, or indeed the Boer War. For what it's worth, I think the Boer war is a good analogy, though I'd suggest that the Thuggee cult is possibly a better one.

Secondly, it should be observed that wider forces were indeed involved in all of these cases. To be specific, the economic and military capacity of Britain and France to defeat Germany at that point. Or the economic failure of the Soviet Union, leading to its inability to compete on military terms as the prime cause for perestroika and glasnost. That should also be set against the consequences of the Reagan doctrine in terms of instability and the risks had Gorbachev responded with force. In the present time, we might observe that the question of states is barely relevant (which makes appeasement a poor analogy), since much of the terrorism in question occurs quite independently of state structures and typically tends to thrive in opposition to them (as the history of the British Empire should testify as much as current events in Iraq). In short, I'm rather sceptical about Mr Hanson's thesis. But I do have a counter-factual of my own: what if the US had not applied the Reagan doctrine to Afghanistan? Julie Burchill had some ideas on that point. Perhaps the left can benefit from counter-factuals after all (even if only as wish-fulfilment).

Update: Scott Martens suggests that far from being conservative, counter-factuals are whiggish, depicting scenarios wherein progress is derailed from its correct course (in other words, a past tense version of dystopian fiction). He further notes that conservatism tends to be determinist in its own fashion also; constrained by a fixed notion of human nature rather than history. I'm a little reluctant to describe the genre in terms that are quite so essentialist (the term covers a multitude of sins and Hunt has a point about wish-fulfilment from conservative writers wondering if the British Empire could have been saved), but it is a good point. Consider Ward Moore's Bring the Jubilee, a novel where the South wins the civil war and thereby creates a backward and primitive future. In fairness, I should also say that the Davis Hanson essay I alluded to above is in a similar vein; it dealt with the possibility of the Athenian navy being defeated at Salamis.

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posted by Richard 7:39 pm