Читать книгу The End of Illusions - Andreas Reckwitz - Страница 7

The fact that, until recently, the liberal narrative of progress was able to seem so ubiquitous is not especially unusual if we broaden our perspective and consider the cultural history of modernity as a whole. Over the course of industrialization, democratization, urbanization, marketization, emancipation, and the rise of science, modern society has been developing slowly but steadily since the eighteenth century (and at first in Western nations), and it has always been inextricably linked to a vision of making progress: to the “project of modernity.” As Reinhart Koselleck observed, the rise of the semantics of progress coincided with the reality of (political, economic, and technological) revolutions at the end of the eighteenth century; the semantics of progress accompanied these revolutions and, in part, actively impelled them.³ In a sense, modernity converted the religious belief in the assurance of salvation into a firm belief in progress.

Of course, throughout the history of modernity in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, there were often heated debates over what, exactly, this realized or desired progress ought to be about: technology, freedom, equality, welfare and comfort, self-determination, or emancipation? In addition, there have always been alternating phases of progressive optimism and cultural-critical self-doubt. In nineteenth-century Europe, the Napoleonic Wars were followed by a long phase of bourgeois self-confidence and the unwavering hope for civilizational progress (accompanied, not coincidentally, by imperialism and colonialism). At the beginning of the twentieth century, the baton of progressive optimism was passed on to burgeoning socialist movements. The First World War was then followed by a phase of gnawing intellectual uncertainty and widespread skepticism, which gave rise, among certain thinkers, to an outright catastrophic outlook concerning the downfall of European modernity. In this regard, it is enough to read Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West or José Ortega y Gasset’s The Revolt of the Masses.⁴ After the civilizational upheaval of fascism, the Holocaust, and the Second World War, liberal progressive optimism resurfaced astonishingly quickly in Western Europe and North America. What followed was the trente glorieuses (as Jean Fourastié called these three decades), which were characterized by the rise of affluent societies in the West and by visions of creating a perfect form of industrial-technical modernity. In the 1970s, these societies were confronted with economic and ecological debates over the “limits to growth” and with the discomforting social critique in the wake of 1968. Then the communist system collapsed, the final and most radical thrust toward globalization commenced, and the digital revolution began, thus initiating a renewed phase of the liberal narrative of progress in an era of presumably unlimited opportunity. Today, this narrative is stridently being called into question.

It is instructive to keep in mind these previous upsurges of the social discourse of progress. A historical perspective relativizes many things – both the blind faith that people sometimes have in the conflict-free progress of human development, and the defeatist and catastrophic attitude that inevitably follows. Our current situation, at any rate, is characterized by the genre of dystopia.⁵ For many people, the sense of disappointment over the failure of the liberal ideal of progress is so great that now, driven by strong emotions such as rage or despair, they tend to fall into the opposite extreme. If public discourse were a psychiatric patient, we would have to say that it displays symptoms of manic depression: boundless euphoria is immediately followed by feelings of profound hopelessness (which, in many people, seem to be accompanied by a quiet sense of pleasure about the impending disaster).

The current dystopias point in different directions. Enormously present in the media – particularly in the digital world, but also in the popular book market – are the diagnoses of downfall from members of the New Right. They have ultimately revived the cyclical philosophy of history found in Spengler’s The Decline of the West. In contrast, one hears entirely different opinions from left-wing critics who, in the wake of the financial crisis, have been gathering evidence for the imminent implosion of capitalism – a collapse that many of these authors themselves, owing to the lack of a socialist alternative, can only imagine as a hopeless ongoing crisis. On top of this, the public discourse about digitalization has meanwhile almost fully transformed from one of tech euphoria into a sweeping critique of technology. The latter discourse now prefers to associate the digital revolution with the all-encompassing control of users by business-related or government data collectors, with filter bubbles and caustic communication, and finally with automation and the threat of mass unemployment.

In light of these catastrophic scenarios, today’s public and political discourse often grasps at the straws of nostalgia. In particular, the period of industrial modernity between 1945 and 1975, which just a few years ago seemed like an entirely distant past, has meanwhile been transformed into a projection screen for various sorts of nostalgic longing – nostalgia from the right, from the left, and from the center. Right-wing nostalgia in the United States, France, or Germany glorifies the traditional family values and gender roles that were still dominant in those years, as well as the era’s conservative morality and supposed cultural homogeneity. Left-wing nostalgia looks back to that period and yearns for its greater social equality, for its strong industrial workforce, and for the welfare state of the old industrial society. Finally, centrist nostalgia looks wistfully back to an era of people’s parties, the large middle class, and a presumably more leisurely pace of life. Such trips down memory lane often have less to do with politics than they do with retro aesthetic trends, but they can also serve the ends of various forms of political populism in an effective way.