The question that haunts my mind...
History
Two hundred years ago, when the Ancient Regime was still
powerful and pervasive in the Western Civilization, the revolutionary idea of
dethroning royal families and removing cardinals and bishops from public
offices was a noble quest. The royal families ruled despotically, the caste
society was unfairly repressive, the church had lost the spiritual function to
which it was intended. For a middle class bourgeoisie of the time there was no
better option than being more or less revolutionary. Things had to change. And
they changed.
Seeing history backwards always helps understanding where we
are now. But comparing the ideals of those times to the ones of today also
helps gauging the value of our own time. The question goes: Where are we? And
by “we” I mean the Western Civilization. I’m explicitly discounting the worlds
of Islam, Hindu, Africa, East Asia and maybe the Slavic Orthodox societies. I’m
counting in most of Western Europe and its former colonies (except those in
Africa). In few words, I’m talking about the array of national societies that
emerged from Roman Christianity some way or the other. Where is the Western
Civilization going? To me it seems to have disappeared almost entirely. And to
me that is a sad, unfortunate and tragic fact.
We can divide the history of the Western Civilization as
before and after the French Revolution of 1789, because it was in the French Revolution
where the modern debate of freedom and secularism slammed into our history not
to leave the center stage ever again. In every country this event manifested
itself in various forms, but given that France was then the peak of European civilization,
a momentous social movement like this spread like wildfire. Even the Anglo
American revolution of 1776, which began more than a decade before its French
counterpart, was a consequence of the intellectual and social forces that where
being cultivated in Paris’ slums.
From the French Revolution of 1789 emerged the revolutionary
ideal that convinced so many people from Jefferson, Hegel, Bolivar and Proudhon,
to Juarez, Marx, Lenin and Che Guevara, and so forth. Paris’ massive rebellion
became an icon, then an ideal, then a conviction, then a way of living. If we
look at the French Revolution as nothing more than a successful plebeian
rebellion in the capital of a particular civilization at the moment of its cultural
peak, we start to wonder if everything that came afterwards was nothing but a misinterpretation,
if not a huge misunderstanding. It was just a rebellion like many others in the
history of mankind; however, this one was interpreted as a definite moment in a
historical phenomenon usually referred to as “progress”. And it was the impression
that there was a historical progress that put so many bright minds in the path
of searching the direction of this phenomenon.
But if we consider the possibility that there was never a
progressive movement; if we consider the option that this impression was
nothing but an idiosyncratic feature of a civilization reaching its peak of
self fulfillment; maybe then we can understand why we seemed to be at a
complete lost today: because we were looking for something, and framed the most
comprehensive discourses about something that we were sure was there, when it
wasn’t. This is the most paradoxical feature of all progressive political
discourses and movements today: that they move an agenda based on a north that
is purely ideological.
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