Professor Mark Lilla reflects on his recent release, The Shipwrecked Mind: On Political Reaction, in an interview with Humanities:
Source: Vos Iz Neias?
MARK LILLA: One of the most common metaphors for history, and for time itself, is that of a river. Time flows, history has currents, etc. While thinking about this image, it occurred to me that some people believe that time carries us along and all we can do is passively experience the ride. Think of cyclical theories of history or even cosmology: The world runs its course, is destroyed, and is then reborn to travel the cycle again.
Other people, though, have a catastrophic conception of history: The river flows but it may not be heading in the right direction. It might flow into a channel full of shoals or rocks, where a ship can run aground or be shattered. This, I think, is the picture of history that reactionaries have. They believe that some calamitous event has taken place in time, that history has gone off course, and that the kind of society they lived in (or imagined they lived in) has shattered. They find themselves on the shore, looking on as the debris of everything they valued is swept away by the current. The present becomes unbearable, as does the prospect of the future. And so they convince themselves that something radical must be done to either recover or redeem what has been lost.
It’s a great metaphor. I tend to think that that those who end up on the beach, dismayed by the wreckage, are those whose psyche required them to be in control. The power seekers, those who sought certitude, those who became married to the reality of their day, rather than the social currents, for want of a better term. Perhaps they even manage to freeze the areas under their control for a while.
But change is inevitable. From technology to church, change is inevitable; and those that don’t become the fossils we dig up, from history books and mass burial pits, or they become those responsible for those pits.
Later, Lilla notes:
Conservatives and liberals argue about politics in terms of human nature, and their dispute is about the proper relationship between individuals and societies. Traditionally, liberals begin with individuals who are endowed with certain rights, and think of the legitimacy of political institutions in terms of consent and the protection of those rights. Conservatives begin with societies and the observation that we all come into them as dependents, incurring obligations as we are protected and nurtured by them. Our rights are conventional, not natural, and are not the essence of politics. Traditions and norms are.
And so I fall into neither camp. The liberal camp doesn’t work for me as it assumes some Divine being to assign those rights; or they have to make murky assumptions about how intellectual concepts are integral to biological evolution. The conservative approach smacks of slavery, such that liberty no longer has a value. Perhaps this would be better put as the creation of false obligations on those who had little choice in them.
My own interpretation of the granting of rights is more pragmatic; what will keep the mob from burning down the White House or lynch the Monarch in outrage, vs what will cause society to implode through overburden? While most would agree Justice is a human construct, a position that is showing signs of instability, oddly enough, I see it as playing a role in such assignments. For all that the American Constitution makes an appeal to the Divine, the actual assignment appears to work fairly well.
And now taken well out of context is this interesting sentence.
One learns infinitely more about politics by reading Isaiah Berlin than by reading John Rawls.
I don’t know a darn thing about either of them – but now I’m interested.
