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by Michael Bonner
April 30,
2023
from
TheEpochTimes Website
When I was growing up in the 1990s, amidst all the exuberance of the
American unipolar moment, I certainly thought I lived in a
civilization, and an advanced one at that.
The mood of the time was captured in the near-universal
misunderstanding of Francis Fukuyama's thesis about the "end
of history," as well as in the Disney cartoon "Aladdin."
Both "Aladdin" and
Fukuyama invited us to imagine "a whole new world," and both did
so coincidentally in 1992.
Nothing, it seemed, could halt the steady progress of a new age
of peace, stability, wealth, and freedom.
But, in the West, so much
seems to have gone wrong since that moment.
Disaster in Iraq,
Rwanda, and the Balkans should have disturbed western
complacency, but didn't.
Neither did the
damage done by neoliberal economics, hyper-globalization,
outsourcing, and the de-industrialization of the West.
The 1990s also saw the
rise of the Taliban, and the following century opened with the
destruction of the Buddhas of Bamiyan in Afghanistan and the attacks
of 9/11 in America.
Since then we seem to have lurched from one crisis to another:
...and latterly the,
All this is to say that
the "whole new world" we were promised in the '90s is much like the
old one,
only worse...!
And the theory of
irreversible progress seems increasingly implausible in the face
of steady decline.
But this doesn't mean that there's nothing we can do.
Decline isn't
irreversible either.
If that were true,
then human civilization would never have recovered from its
first collapse thousands of years ago.
Renewal is possible even after a long interval, as is shown, for
example, by the,
-
revival of Europe
after the collapse of the Roman Empire
-
the ebb and flow
of civilization in Egypt, Mesopotamia, or China despite
repeated foreign conquest...
So no matter how bad
things may seem, civilization can recover...
But how would we bring about this renewal?
The modern answer centers
on innovation:
doing something
revolutionary and starting over again...!
Most of us now living in
the West are used to thinking of practically all aspects of life in
the same way that we think of technology.
One technological
change supersedes another, and each change rapidly ushers in
another one.
The same process
supposedly governs social and moral development.
This mode of thought
passes without question now.
But it would have
seemed very disagreeable to a peasant who lived through the
French Revolution, a Ukrainian farmer enduring Stalin's
five-year plans, or an indigenous inhabitant of the New World
whose life was upended after the arrival of Europeans.
The Western obsession
with sweeping away the past is highly peculiar, of
course, and it is also highly destructive.
In contrast, all the great recoveries - whether successive Egyptian
or Chinese dynasties, the European Renaissance, or the Islamic
Golden Age - were inspired by imitating older cultural models.
Even the so-called
Scientific Revolution involved Copernicus and Galileo
revisiting Byzantine and Perso-Arabic theories of physics and
astronomy.
Greek philosophy and mathematics owed a huge debt to far older
Near-Eastern models salvaged from the Late Bronze Age Collapse
around 1177 BC.
And Confucius
claimed to be a mere transmitter of the customs and values of
the ancient Zhou state founded in 1046 BC.
The Western obsession with revolutionary change and novelty grew out
of the Age of Discovery, matured throughout the
Reformation and Enlightenment, and ossified into an
ideology in the early 20th century.
(L-R) Italian futurists Luigi Russolo, Carlo Carrà,
Filippo
Tommaso Marinetti, Umberto Boccioni,
and Gino Severini in front of Le Figaro,
Paris, on Feb. 9 1912.
Marinetti, author of the “Futurist Manifesto,”
urged the total repudiation
and destruction of the past.
(Public Domain)
The ideological part was
the work of Italian poet and art critic Filippo Tommaso Marinetti,
whose "Futurist
Manifesto" appeared in 1909.
Marinetti urged the total repudiation of the past and the
rapid acceleration of technological and social changes.
He worshiped the
alleged beauty of speed.
He hated museums,
praised war as a form of hygiene, and wanted to see ancient
cities utterly destroyed.
The "Futurist Manifesto"
crystallized trends that are still with us.
The informal motto of
Silicon Valley is,
"move fast and break
things."
Elon Musk,
Richard Branson, and Jeff Bezos, for instance, could be
considered Futurist prophets of fast cars, trains, rocket ships,
high-speed downloads, and near-instantaneous deliveries...
Tech companies and CEOs still speak of accelerating change, and the
constant action and insomnia favored by Marinetti are the virtues of
the modern office worker.
Futurism could be considered the Mother of All Ideologies.
In Italy, the
Futurists turned Fascist.
They were Bolsheviks
in Russia, and Nazis elsewhere...
They all agreed with
Marinetti's vision:
progress meant
repudiating and destroying the past...!
In the fascist utopia,
the state would serve only the strong.
Communism would usher
in the dictatorship of the proletariat.
Nazism reimagined the
Marxist class struggle as a conflict among races, and envisioned
the end point of history as the thousand-year Reich.
These Golden Ages
all lay ahead, owing nothing to history.
And, as Marinetti seemed
to foresee, they would take shape amidst obscene destruction and
murder.
Thus the most horrific disasters in human history have a common
origin not in the veneration of the past, as some believe, but in
utopian visions of
the future.
So why, we might ask,
is future-orientation still such a powerful idea?
And if looking to the
future is so bad, what should we do instead?
This is what the book "In
Defense of Civilization - How Our Past Can Renew Our Present" is
about.
It attempts to
explain what makes human civilization what it is.
It shows what we are
in danger of losing through decline or collapse, and points the
way toward renewal.
The book argues that
civilized life itself arose because our ancient ancestors developed
a connection with the past and felt that they had a place in
history... a feeling that we are now very close to losing.
And it asserts that every former renewal of civilization has been
inspired by memory of the past and a deliberate effort to imitate
it.
Despite the uncertainties and tensions of contemporary life, and the
perception of decline, we should remind ourselves that the future we
think we want is never the future we actually get...
But, if we want it to, civilization will outlast our failures.
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