Doing versus imagining (24)

You can’t answer these questions (the one about economics and production or the one about culture and conformity) in advance. You’d have to work them out on the ground, in an actual town, or in a group of people that is in the process of forming a town. What does it mean to be “in the process of forming a town”? What does that look like? That also is something that needs to get worked out.

That we cannot answer these questions in advance is not a problem but a virtue. This working things out as we go is just the sort of work we need to be doing.

 

A few years ago, a friend of mine made an interesting observation about the current political situation. He had been reading about the French Revolution and in particular about The Terror. For those who don’t remember high-school history class (I didn't before this conversation), The Terror was a period in which the newly formed Republican government carried out thousands of executions and massacres of prisoners. The targets of these executions were not only nobility and royalty but former members of the Republican government itself who were found to be not radical enough, not revolutionary enough. The question as to why this happened, what factors produced such a bloody process of ideological purification, was one of the major historical preoccupations of the 19^th century. In his book on the revolution, de Tocqueville sets out to answer this question. His answer goes like this:

 

Under feudalism, governing power had been widely distributed across a large class of local lords and their ministers. But as France moved towards an absolute monarchy, power became more and more centralized, until, under Louis XIV, the state was run almost entirely by a small cadre of loyal bureaucrats of common birth who could be easily replaced if they didn’t do what the king wanted. The result was that the educated classes were no longer involved in governing. Cut off from the messy, pragmatic details of actual governance, with all their compromises and negotiations, their thinking became increasingly theoretical, idealistic, and extreme—or so de Tocqueville argues. So when the revolution came, they were all already, on an intellectual level, fanatics.

 

My friend’s point was, this is exactly what’s happening in America (and maybe all over the world) today. With almost no political agency, a strong sense that something’s wrong but no access to the real levers of power, insulated from opposing views, our political ideas are becoming increasingly ideologically pure and intolerant of disagreement. We view opposing positions are analyzed as fundamentally corrupt or diseased—the result of racism, greed, hysteria, cowardice, sexual repression, cruelty. I’m thinking not just of left vs. right (terms whose meaning is quickly breaking down anyhow) but of almost every one of the various camps that have emerged in the space where the old left and right once existed: the “identitarian” left, the “Bernie bros,” the old-style liberals, the neo-cons, the alt-right, etc. 

 

When, on rare occasions, I peek with squinted eyes inside a newspaper, or against my better judgment read an op-ed someone has sent me, and even more when I scroll down to the comments section, what I find are people shouting from one position or another, and their tone (sometimes shrill, sometimes sneering, sometimes “let’s cut all the BS”) is always the tone of people who can do nothing but shout (or at least speak), who make no compromises because there is nothing to compromise on, because they are not at work on something concrete, because their “participation” in governance consists only in expressing opinions. And this is not their fault.