"Today civilization is indeed in a critical stage which has only one historical analogy: the crisis caused by the rise of Christianity. All traditions are used up, all beliefs abolished; on the other hand, the new program is not ready, that is, has not yet entered the consciousness of the masses. This is what I call 'dissolution.' It is the most atrocious moment in the existence of societies. Everything contributes to sadden people of good will: prostitution of conscience, triumph of mediocrity, confusion of truth and falsehood, betrayal of principles, baseness of passions, cowardice of morals . . . We shall not see the work of the new age. We shall struggle in the night, and we must do our best to endure this life without too much sadness. Let us stand by each other, and call out to each other in the dark, and do justice as often as opportunity is given."
This quote is found in the correspondence of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. It seems decidedly Tea Party-like in its views and its ominous prophetic tone. It was written 150 years ago, in France, by a man who is viewed as influential in the development of fascism, anarchism, and the mushrooming of European anti-Semitism.
This is not a reason to dismiss his views out of hand, however. I think it requires us to examine them as closely and dispassionately as possible. It bears the imprint of eschatological thinking, for which the Jews are generally "blamed" but which Christianity carried to new heights. In the decline of the "Old Europe" and the eclipse of Christianity by faith in reason, Proudhon stood angrily at the forefront of those who would overthrow the last vestiges of providential thought, and who espoused his thinking with a prophetic and evangelical intensity.
Proudhon considered himself a proponent of "anti-theism," and yet, as Karl Löwith remarks, he was deeply marked by Christianity's messianic perspective on history: "It is faith in the coming Kingdom of God which inspired Proudhon's fight against God and providence for the sake of human progress." He was, in this regard, aligned (as Löwith notes), with Marx and Nietzsche.
Our ideas of progress and history are so tangled with our ideas of redemption and destiny that we magnify our every virtue and defect a thousandfold. We endow our every decision with universal significance, when, more often than not, it's our throwaway decisions that have the most lasting impact.
The apocalyptic tone of Proudhon's writing, and of our current political debates, bothers me. A lot. It both indicates and foments a hysterical fever in a national psyche that portends too much and solves too little. It ascribes overbearing significance to ills that have to be addressed with patience and collaboration. It takes pleasure in the slow-motion wreck of opposing forces. It encourages amateur prophesying and divisive, apocalyptic campaigning that paints a particular group or class as the source of all ills, as the carrier of the germ that will infect the national corpus and consciousness.
What if we decided that all our mistakes weren't that big a deal? That we weren't responsible for the execution of some Providential plan? What if we understood that it was entirely up to us, us alone in the wide Universe, to make a go of it, to iron it out? What if we set aside the notion that at some preordained moment in history, a Judge would come to divide the Wicked and the Righteous, and instead judged ourselves, strictly but with a long view?
What if we imagined that on this planet, our collective consciousness was the fractured Whole that had to be called back into cohesion? What if we took it upon ourselves to get it right, and stopped wrapping ourselves in the robes of some definitive sanctity that can never be either purged or proven?
This doesn't mean, necessarily, that there is no Grand Plan for history, no Redemption in the offing. It just means our most widely cherished views how to help attain it are hopelessly wide of the mark, and that, just perhaps, if we determined to rely entirely on ourselves, and on whatever judgment with which we were endowed, we would quickly tire of prophesying, sacrificing and slaughtering in the name of the Providence that we alone may constitute.
Proudhon was self-consciously provocative and apparently very bigoted. Like any good "anti-theist," he was steeped in and defined by the tradition he claimed to loathe. He was dangerous, darkly prophetic, and located on about the same spot of the Mobius strip as we are. His ideas, just now, deserve our careful scrutiny, our skeptical attention, our insistence to do better with what we have, and not just what we hope for.
--T.A.
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