miércoles, 13 de febrero de 2013

Where are freedom and secularism leading us? Part 1



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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