The Master gets a masterful obit. @sarahlyall https://t.co/hfZoUZGBMy
— Mark Mazzetti (@MarkMazzettiNYT) December 14, 2020
that you think everything is current and dynamic, and the future is already known as an extension of the present (it seldom is), and the past is set in stone an immovable (it certainly isn't); also, that connections to the past are identifiable and knowable and explain everything up to the moment. Except when you forget relevant portions of the past.
I posted the tweet above because of this passage from the obituary:
“In its way, it marked a boundary between two eras: the era of God-is-in-our side patriotism, of trust in government and in the morality of the West, and the era of paranoia, of conspiracy theory and suspicion of government, of moral drift,” Stephen Schiff wrote in Vanity Fair. As many of Mr. le Carré’s books would be, “The Spy Who Came in From the Cold” was made into a movie; Richard Burton starred as Leamas.
It was with a shock of recognition that I recognized the familiarity of the transition from "trust in government and in the morality of the West" to "the era of paranoia, of conspiracy theory and suspicion of government, of moral drift." I knew I recognized the language of Donald Trump and Steve Bannon. I'd just forgotten why.
Oh, they get it all wrong, and screw up most of it because they are stupid men convinced of their greater intelligence (the stupider you are, the more convinced you are of your superior intellect. It's seems to be a law of nature related to an inverse relationship between reality and fantasy, caused no doubt by awareness of the deficit, the yawning abyss, and determination to make it go away somehow). But they were not sui generis, and it's not a brand-new thing in American politics or culture. It's just passed, as long hair and loud, raucous music did, from progressives and liberals to convervatives and rednecks.
And Eng-uh-land swings like a pendulum do. Except pendulums don't swing in just one direction, The back swing is always retrograde, but always carries back with it what was picked up on the way rightward. Maybe Yeats was on to something with those gyres, after all....
Back when I was trying to understand Bergson on time (I couldn't) that the present is made out of the past, not only the most immediate past which was also made from the past but all of the past was something that came to mind. To a good extent the past lives on in the present and has force for a long time.
ReplyDeleteThe relationship of how the present is motivated to become the future seemed more obscure but, then, the future is more obscure because it can't be consciously observed or written down with fact checking.
Rupert Sheldrake, a far smarter man than I am, discussing the well documented phenomenon of presentiment in experiments like those Daryl Bem and many others have conducted (and they are some of the most rigorously, robustly and replicated of experiments done around human behavior) talked about how the wave behavior of electrons and other atomic level particles could be considered as evidence that in some manner the future is also contained in the present, I assume because otherwise the wave motion wouldn't move.
I think what ebbs and flows between normal levels of human badness and total depravity is the committment to morality among human beings, it's never 100% or perfect - humans being human - but there are all too brief periods when a significant number of people are better at doing to others what they'd want done unto them, refraining from lying for attempted advantage or just the thrill of gossiping and who refrain from paranoid, envious, just cruel meanness to minority groups or,in general, women. We live in a time in the West, since the 1970s or so, when media companies, certainly those in the English speaking world were allowed to encourage all of the evil there is. I think of the casual racism in British humor, Monty Python,Faulty Towers the excuse that they were "taking the micky" the "anti-political correctness" that soon followed here, the fascist-chic that started in Hollywood in the late 70s if not with the movies of Clint Eastwood and it's totally unsurprising that England has Boris Johnson and the US has Trump. I hope that a wave model of time means we're going to go above the level we're at now but I don't think there's any guarantee that we'll get up there before we manage to kill ourselves.