My two favorite commentaries on yesterday’s celebrations: one from the left, one from the right, both wondering if something wasn’t lost when so much was putatively gained.
First, Ross Douthat, conservative Boy Wonder at the Times:
Humankind fears judgment, of course. But we depend on it as well. The possibility of dissolution lends a moral shape to history: we want our empires to fall as well as rise, and we expect decadence to be rewarded with destruction.
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Neither group [liberal or conservative] wanted the United States to lose the cold war. But they wanted to inhabit a world where America could lose, and pass into history, if we failed to live up to our ideals.
Perhaps, then, the sudden leap to ideology (neocon, radical Islam, etc) in the last decade or so: hard to get judged if you don’t take chances. Might also explain the ongoing power of religion, despite the putative end of ideological conflict (a la Fukuyama). Or, as Douthat suggests, perhaps that accounts for the continued internecin warfare in American politics: perhaps it’s an of fashioned fight over how to get (and by extension who gets) saved.
The point is, in its way, well taken. But then, doesn’t assume that we in the west were right? Not just kind of, better-that-Stalinist sort of right, but capital-R right, End of History right. Well, here is Slavoj Zizek, unaccountably also writing for the Times, to argue otherwise.
He rambles as much as ever here, but he comes to a good puzzle: why are there still anticommunists? And why are they found precisely where Soviet Communism was defeated?
Where does this resurrection of anti-Communism draw its strength from? Why were the old ghosts resuscitated in nations where many young people don’t even remember the Communist times? The new anti-Communism provides a simple answer to the question: “If capitalism is really so much better than Socialism, why are our lives still miserable?”
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What these belated anti-Communists fail to realize is that the image they provide of their society comes uncannily close to the most abused traditional leftist image of capitalism: a society in which formal democracy merely conceals the reign of a wealthy minority. In other words, the newly born anti-Communists don’t get that what they are denouncing as perverted pseudo-capitalism simply is capitalism.
Well, give or take a poor average standard of living, this is probably true. No one said that everyone was going to get rich. That, after all, was Marx’s promise, not Smith’s. He comes finally to his point about 1989:
As many commentators observed, the ideals that led the protesters were to a large extent taken from the ruling Socialist ideology itself — people aspired to something that can most appropriately be designated as “Socialism with a human face.” Perhaps this attitude deserves a second chance.
The answer is not that we need to declare our post-ideological ideology–liberal democracy and neoliberal economics–the best, but that we need new one, always new ideas, to keep the wheels spinning, and we need radical thinkers to traffick in them:
They will have to invent their own ideologies. They will be denounced as dangerous utopians, but they alone will have awakened from the utopian dream that holds the rest of us under its sway.
In other word–echt Zizek point, this–only radical ideology can save us from the ideological swoon we currently find ourselves in. Without ideological conflict–shorn, we can only hope, of the guns-and-bombs conflict of the last century–we can never save ourselves from the horrors of ideology itself.
That might almost be a big enough idea to make events like yesterday’s make sense.
