i think this idea of progressives vs. reactionaries is one sort of terrible mistake about the nature of time, identified by heidegger and others: it treats time as space. the progressive is an emissary from the future, like the terminator, a time traveler. and i propose to you that time travel is conceptually incoherent: it treats times as places. the progressive comes to us from the future, the reactionary from the past, and the former vaguely represents science, the latter religion or something. but the taliban, the fundamentalist, sarah palin: these folks are entirely saturated in now. and so is the obama brain trust. so are we all. the religious  terrorist is conceived as blowing up the present on behalf of the past, while the rational welfare-state liberal is nurturing the present on behalf of the future. but you can't live in the past, as though it were europe. and you've got no insight into the shape of the future. people are still writing as though religion has been disintegrating since, i don't know, the sixteenth century, replaced by a rational scientific worldview. it has been, to whatever extent it has been. the future might belong entirely to the catholic church or to trance channelers. anyway, to the extent that you take yourself to know the future and to drag us there, and to the extent that you condemn people and belief systems that exist perfectly well here and now as already historically superseded, you're a dictator in your heart. and the same the other way round: if you conceive of the present as a degeneration and want to hold us to 1800 or 1300 or something, your hostility to the present is totalitarian. also either way round you are merely confused about wherewhen you are. the past is gone. the future has no shape. either of these is noplace, is no point of view. who speaks from or as now? everyone. but the self-conceived progressive or reactionary is confused about that.

Comments

[Captain Capitulation]

yes that's right, bergson!

I recently wrote an essay on the use of Heidegger by Dipesh Chakrabarty, and I have since been quite alert to writers attributing ideas to Heidegger which were formulated earlier, and more cogently elsewhere...

Why, I wonder, do you find it useful to take Heidegger to represent the idea of 'time as space'... surely Bergson is the locus classicus for this... and in many ways less problematic as an example, because Heidegger certainly advocated a return to the past (at least after his 'turn')... leaving aside the question of his allegiance to totalitarianism...

[Carl Sachs]

I loved everything about this except for the conflation, towards the very end, of ideology and utopianism. I'd like to see you take on Russell Jacoby's distinction (in his Picture Imperfect) between "blueprint utopians" and "iconoclastic utopians" -- the former aim at legislating the future, the latter aim at destroying pictures which hold us captive of what the future (or the past) ought to be like.

[marriotr]

I agree with this, almost entirely(your choice of liberal concepts as examples is, of course, cause for wincing). This could easily become a broader, anti-ideological framework; my thinking of late has become much the same. It might work particularly well when applied to the atheist-theist combat that keeps going on. Generally, there are people trying to solve problems, and there are people trying to construct systems: the latter are ruining it for the rest of us.