The End of History at the End of Modernism
Returning from the longest writer's block of all time to talk about the anti-promethean backlash of a regressive society that is lacking positive perspectives for the future.
"I like to think (and
the sooner the better!)
of a cybernetic meadow
where mammals and computers
live together in mutually
programming harmony
like pure water
touching clear sky.
I like to think
(right now, please!)
of a cybernetic forest
filled with pines and electronics
where deer stroll peacefully
past computers
as if they were flowers
with spinning blossoms."
- Richard Brautigan, All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace
The end of the "end of history" is often proclaimed while pointing to the undeniable circumstance of events of historical magnitude taking place all around us, all the time. How could history possibly have come to a halt when we are living under a non-zero chance of machine takeover as more and more wars threaten to blow up civilisations?
For a time, the existing order did appear to be crumbling like a dry cookie, ready for us to clean up the crumbs and bake a gorgeous new cake. There was reason to believe that the "Neoliberal Order Breakdown Syndrome" was slowly but surely chipping away at the political establishment. Throughout the 2010s in particular, people with revolutionary ambitions were seeing it coming, and maybe, maybe even likely, they were right at the time.
Any day, now. This crisis, or the next, would be the one in which we would finally manage to open doors for intervention, to organise, to use the disenfranchisement of the people and the incompetence of political leaders in our favour to fuel the fire of class consciousness and get things moving to a better place. A system in disorder would need just the right component to start running to the benefit of workers everywhere, and we were of course convinced that we had cracked it, we knew what was happening, what changes the world needed, and how to introduce them.
Any day, now. And then, unexpectedly, this day never came. We never did figure out the right move at the right time and things remained the same, if not worse. The neoliberal order is alive and well, consistently adapting to new circumstances like a disease changing shape to perpetuate itself and resist medical advancements, propping up its last legs on the remainder of the Covid crisis that has prevented any semblance of organising and networking for years, that has lead to a standstill in projects and caused widespread discouragement among the broader left.
At this point, some might say that this is it, that we were wrong about the end of history having ended to make room for meaningful change and we’re doomed to a sad reality without progress. Maybe it’s over, after all. Or maybe it isn’t? Maybe the end of history is best described as a postmodern collective state of mind shaped by a long period of political defeats.
What the "end of history" means to me is the end of our perceived self-agency more than a halt in the occurrence of relevant, world-changing events and systemic change. The “end of history“ ends as soon as people become aware of their political potential and their power as historical beings, and history ends once again as soon as this awareness dies.
It is most certainly naïve for small individual groups of lefties to each be convinced that they'll be the ones to kick off the revolution, and it does lead to a good amount of unfinished projects and activist burnout, but when this naïve energy is depleted, the only thing a society can do is regress, which is starting to show itself through the spread of "back-to-nature, small-is-beautiful, limits-to-growth ideas".
The trend of embracing degrowth and deindustrialisation comes out of a general sense that we as a society have collectively failed our great quests. This leads many to think that the only next step can be a retraction to anti-modernism – modernism being defined by the belief that humans have the power to construct a rational social order that allows people to live in peace, material security, and freedom. The great promises of enlightened modernism have not yet realised themselves and led us to prosperity for all – in fact, economic inequality has been increasing, quality of life is dropping in the face of exploding costs of living and wage stagnation, feelings of anxiety and depression are peaking on a melting planet with people finding themselves more alienated and isolated than ever, all in spite of technological development that for most of human history used to be a reliable indicator of improved productive capacity, greater abundance, and a general cause for futuristic bloomerism.
"We made it to the moon, and then stopped going. We pioneered commercial supersonic air travel, and then discontinued it. We developed nuclear power, and then stopped building new plants."
With the belief in a better future slowly being ground down to dust, a romanticisation of the past in which things were allegedly "better" starts to take shape. If technological progress has not led humanity to physical and material security, could it be reasonable to assume we already had it figured out in the past, and a more primitive state of civilisation is all that humanity is capable of handling? Maybe our systems and societies are simply too complex for our feeble little minds at this point, and we need to return to something more manageable, to a time when everyone knew where they belonged in life and in community. The more conservative among us long for the "tradlife" - housewives, churches, lifescript. Disillusioned leftists are more likely to believe in small circles of self-organised local groups of love, peace, mutual aid, and sharing garden tomatoes. Neither group believes in rationally planned progress using technology to the fullest by dismantling capitalist exploitation and the profit motive, it is all about returning to a simpler time, avoiding a potentially scary future that is sure to contain unexpected, incomprehensible turns in development that will be difficult to navigate. In a world without an optimistic narrative for where we’re going, a look back to the past becomes nostalgic comfort.
On the other side, we have the techno-optimists. Back in October, the "Techno-Optimist Manifesto" written by venture capitalist Marc Andreessen was a controversially discussed piece in the blogosphere. The manifesto propagates technology as the one big thing that is going to save the future and solve our collective problems, if only we allow it to – which means full on free-for-all accelerationism, getting on the train of progress without even thinking of asking where we’re going, resisting regulation and brakes at all costs. Things will be fine – since technology has improved our lives overall more than it has hurt us, it is sure to lead us to a better future eventually, even if it is going to be hundreds of years from now. Will there be collateral damage? Yes, of course, always has been. But since we do not get to pick and choose which parts of technological development we do and do not want, we have to accept the bad with the good, for the greater good, according to the techno-optimist.
Most comments I’ve seen on the techno-optimist manifesto essentially formed a battle between the techno-bloomers and the techno-doomers, with very few voices of reason in between. Brink Lindsey recognises this dialectic when he describes the environmental movement we need as one that “rejects this zero-sum vision and with it the twin impostors of technological naïveté and technological despair.” His vision aims for “harmony between man and nature”, combining “ecological sensibility with enthusiasm for improving our tools: We are as gods and might as well get good at it”.
"humanity’s historical march — particularly the last five hundred years — has seen mankind gradually emerge from this primordial dark age through a slow but progressive process of enlightenment which is proven to the modern ideologue by the rationalization/mechanization of all facets of human life, the erosion of organized religion, greater technological advancement, the formal institutionalization of human rights and the empowerment of formerly marginalized groups." x
Andreessen takes note of the same anti-promethean backlash Lindsey does when he refers to a “mass demoralisation campaign” against technology and against life, and I would agree that complete demoralisation is not something we should support if we aspire to escape the vortex of doomerism - those who claim that overall, technology has done more good than harm, despite its drawbacks, do have a fair point. As optimistic prometheans, as people who would like to see positive change in the world through a utilisation of innovative tools that benefit us all, we ought to give the techno-optimists some credit for not leaving the field open for those who would like to give it all up and move back to the village. Just as much as we need to find reasonable regulation where it is needed, the mindset of “we have progressed enough and it is time to go back” needs to be stopped with the force of a moon landing before it destroys our ability to imagine brighter days.
“It is not too much to expect that our children will enjoy in their homes electrical energy too cheap to meter, will know of great periodic regional famines in the world only as matter of history, will travel effortlessly over the seas and under them and through the air with a minimum of danger and at great speeds, and will experience a lifespan far longer than ours.” — Lewis L. Strauss, Chairman, United States Atomic Energy Commission, 1954
We need to bring back utopian modernism and do our best to shape the future. This is only possible if we understand ourselves as agents, if we understand that it is possible to deliberately change society as a whole, which postmodernism rejects fundamentally by replacing meta-narratives of emancipation with a focus on local contexts and individual experiences, denigrating the “hubris of reason”.
To explain our lack of consciousness of ourselves as historical beings, Byung-Chul Han uses the term "de-narrativization" in his 2024 book "The Crisis of Narration". The term connects the postmodern condition we live in to the mass of information that we are exposed to every second, with no time or mental capacity to process what is happening on a greater scale before the next bit of information demands our full attention. There is no linearity, no context, there is only now, and now, and now – a way of digesting what is happening around us that couldn't be any different in postmodernity. There is no history, there are only moments.
“On the one hand, the informatization of society accelerates its de-narrativization. On the other, amid the tsunami of information, there arises a need for meaning, identity and orientation, that is, a need to clear the thick forest of information in which we risk losing ourselves. The flood of ephemeral narratives, including conspiracy theories, and the tsunami of information are ultimately two sides of the same coin. Adrift in the sea of information and data, we seek a narrative anchor.”
Data on its own cannot tell stories, it can only reveal correlations and pieces of fact. It is not capable of explaining contexts, intentions, something’s origin or its direction. Futuristic thinking requires optimistic speculation on the historical position and progression of events. It necessitates filling in gaps with visions and ideas. This cannot happen if instead of hedging our bets we sit idly, waiting for more numbers of mediocre value to come in to capture a situation in yet another isolated moment in time, without any plan for what we intend to do with this information. Treating the data as all there is to knowledge and understanding is how we lose the forest among the trees and understand ourselves as nothing but tiny individual leaves. Instead, what we should be seeing once more is the forest, the land this forest is surrounded by, the borderlands, the continent, the planet, the system, time and space, the progression of time, our collective actions as an influence on the trajectory of systems.
The anti-promethean backlash could therefore be a consequence of a postmodern society of data, one that is full of information but without narrative, without self-awareness, a symptom of doom caused by a political system that only knows how to put out fires and deal with issues as they arise without a greater idea of where it all fits, without grand projects of taking civilisation to another level. Living under these circumstances can limit people’s imagination for the future to the point that they become susceptible to false narratives found in conspiracy theories or the aforementioned romanticization of primitivism. By advocating for absolute non-intervention, the techno-optimist, too, is failing at the promethean task of taking humanity’s destiny into our own hands and achieving controlled mastery over nature and its resources. The techno-bloomers and the techno-doomers are both important to help us eventually move forward to something more rational, reasonable, and planned. Without either of these camps, the other will be left alone at the end of history to make what can only be the wrong decisions.
“Ultimately, it’s the dialectical nature of history that is to blame. Yes, it would be wonderful if we could proceed frictionlessly from thesis to higher synthesis, but history rarely allows that shortcut.”
Like Freddie DeBoer explains in his post “History is long and there’s nothing special about now”, there is no good reason to believe that out of all generations of people, we’re the ones who are seeing the march of history come to a complete stop.
“Why is the notion of the end of history so attractive to so many? I think it’s because of a basic psychological mechanism that few of us would consciously acknowledge: we believe now to be special because we live now.
The period of liberal democratic capitalism that Fukuyama has nominated as the end of history is a tiny blip in humanity’s short history, but it’s the blip in which Fukuyama lives and in which we live. Our consciousness is a remarkably powerful system, but one of its inherent drawbacks is that by its nature it foregrounds and highlights the self. This difficulty in seeing outside of the self leads to all manner of personal and social problems, and it really makes perspective difficult. I think people naturally tend to think that the time they live in is special because they inherently see themselves as special.
But we’re no more able to see outside of our own limited and contingent place in history than the ancient Roman who thought that the empire would never fall. Do I think we’ll see the fall of liberal capitalism in my own lifetime? No, I don’t. But who knows? History moves very slowly, and then all at once.“
I’m not alone, and neither are you. We are part of the movement of history over the course of time. We are part of a constant evolution. If we understand that history is going to progress no matter what, that there is more that we could do than watch everything around us deteriorate, and that any point in our lives could be the point in history in which it all starts to rapidly change, we can understand ourselves as being part of steering that change.
Anything can happen at any time. All that we perceive as stagnation could be a series of slow little steps that will eventually turn out to form a snowball of better luck and systemic overturn. Moving slowly enough to not perceive any movement does not indicate stagnation – think of the earth’s constant rotation that we never consciously perceive – but understanding this requires us to believe in progress instead of giving up and embracing regression.
We do not have to retreat to anti-modernity, and we do not have to passively let ourselves be dragged along through the progression of AI and related technologies. We have to find solutions. We will most likely need a new economic structure and an overhaul of systemic conditions to enable them, it's not going to be fun or easy, but it is definitely possible to create a society that prioritizes human flourishing.
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