OTR Politics - July, 2003

It’s been said that he who controls the past controls the future. But this speaks to what used to be called ‘totalitarian’ societies more than any other. That is simply because controlling the past to the degree that would be necessary in order to control the future entails something like total control. A literary example that comes to mind is Orwell’s 1984 and in a less direct manner the short stories of Philip K. Dick or even, indirectly, Borges. What distinguishes these literary examples is the fact that they are basically thought experiments. They ask what would happen if the past were fully and completely under the control of forces that seek to determine the present and thus colonize the future. The primary feeling generated from such thought experiments is the feeling of claustrophobia, the feeling that there is nowhere to go. This gets back to the old Kantian question as to whether space or time is primary, but without answering that question it is interesting to note that the control of the past and the future is well expressed in a spatial metaphor. When the past is the present is the future there is simply no space at all. In 1984, one of Winston Smith’s first acts of dissent is to create a little space for himself, a place where he can write.

The so-called totalitarian societies of the twentieth century achieved some control over the past, quite a lot of control over the present, and were at work on the future. David Remnick noted recently that had it not been for non-Stalinist parts of the world the name Trotsky might have been erased from historical memory altogether. He simply would not have existed anymore. Those are the kinds of things that controlling the past can do for you and it shouldn’t be very difficult to understand what effect it would have on the future. Of course, the original Marxian idea was that current human history wasn’t really history at all, and that the breaking of its boundaries would create a future so rich and beyond our present comprehension that there wasn’t really all that much point in talking about it. This is something close to the opposite of the situation in which past, present, and future are virtually fused together. But it isn’t an idea that has much resonance right now, in this world. It was an idea from another time.

There are not so many examples of this kind of control of the past and its domination of the future among present human societies but a few notable exceptions have leapt to the fore of late. One example is the brief glimpse into aspects of North Korean society that recent political crises have afforded. But the glimpses are brief and dim. One can imagine that North Korea’s future is running something of a collision course with the other histories in this world and that the deep incompatibility can only be catastrophic. The other notable occasion of temporal disconnect was the Iraqi minister of information who, in the days leading up to the American encircling of Baghdad and even as American forces were entering the city, proclaimed an unending series of Iraqi victories and repulses of American forces. It was an astounding example of staying fidelitous to the world as you’ve constructed it and the more absurd it became the more you almost had to admire the man. Of course, it would have been impossible to truly admire the man since he became the last, semi-comedic, expression of a regime who’s willingness to operate through deceit, terror, and fear has been explained, though shamefully largely ignored, by the likes of Kanan Makiya for many years now.

The problem of past and present and future is a different one now than the totalitarian one and it effects the Left in a particular way. There has been a trend on the Left in recent years and that trend has been toward both a shortening and lengthening of the temporal dimension of analysis. This temporal effect has its corollary in the collapse of a Left political program other than one of critique or extremely long term historical projections; wishing. This has meant that the Left has simply retreated from what one might call existentially lived time. Existentially lived time is that dimension of time that is neither extremely short nor extremely long. It is bounded, in important ways, by the temporal constraints of a human lifetime in which what has just happened must be weighed against what happened some time ago and what might be expected to happen in the near future. But it doesn’t want to stretch its past or its future too far in either direction since what happened a very long time ago is, in important ways, part of another world and what will happen a very long time from now is simply what will be another world. As John Maynard Keynes once said, in the long run we are all dead. And that stretches both ways, we have been dead for an eternity already and we will return to that eternal death again.

The Left used to have something to say about existentially lived time. There will be revolutions, the Left said, and there were. Sometimes they happened days later, sometimes months, sometimes years, but they happened and they happened according to the kind of analysis and politics and social movements that the Left had the pulse of. There will be economic crises, the Left said, and there were. There are things to be done about these crises, the Left said, and then went out and did them and the claims about how the world is from the perspective of existentially lived time could be weighed and argued about and measured and there was no doubt, however one might have disagreed, that the Left (and the ‘Left’ should be understood in the broadest terms here) was a forced to be reckoned with and that its analysis and prognostications and prescriptions had meaning for existentially lived time. And of course this hasn’t gone away completely, nothing goes away completely.

But it is interesting to watch the way in which the Left has retreated from the space of existentially lived time as it has become less confident about its predictions and prescriptions. As it has lost capacity to say much about how the world ought to be it has also lost perspicuity about how the world actually is, and the ‘is’ is always defined within the scope of existentially lived time. One can see it, for instance, in the purely, and sometimes hysterically, critical role that the Left takes on. When things had become bogged down in Nasariya for even as little as a day there was the immediate admonishment that things had become a quagmire. When it soon become clear that things had not become a quagmire there was a retreat again to long-term prognostications about how conditions in the Middle East are sure to deteriorate given the ‘long term’, given a proper consideration to the ‘history of the problem’, of which the actors on the ground are held to have little understanding. This same inability to have anything persuasive to say about the realm of existentially lived time can be witnessed repeatedly on any number of issues.

One of the interesting things about totalitarian societies, if such a generalizing term can be used to cover societies ranging from Stalinist Russia, to Nazi Germany, to Baathist Iraq, to current North Korea, is the way that existentially lived time is relentlessly encroached upon. Or, to put it another way, the realm of existentially lived time is made indistinguishable from both the past and the future. What normally distinguishes existentially lived time is its capacity to synthesize the past, present, and future in such a way that their differences are preserved while their possibility of holding together in the continuity of experience is upheld. The realm of existentially lived time is a realm where uncertainty is tempered by, or held within the realm of, a framework of possibility. The ‘totalizing’ aspect of totalitarian societies serves to negate the aspect of experience that holds sway in existentially lived time. This phenomenon is correlative to the negation of public space in those societies. Public space is the space where differing projections of hopes, desires, attitudes, views, etc., have a venue. It is the common space of politics. But it is one of the primary aims of totalitarian societies, as they homogenize time, to eradicate politics. It was often said of Iraq under Saddam that there simply wasn’t any politics anymore. And thus there was no public, political space. And thus there wasn’t any longer the experience of existentially lived time. To return to the Iraqi minister, his pronouncements were only possible because on the one hand there was no space in which to articulate an alternative narrative of what was happening and on the other, there was no temporal model anymore that could allow for such a chain of events. As a friend in Iraq wrote to Makiya in 1991, “There is no one who remembers or who even dares to remember the meaning of words like ‘freedom’, ‘democracy’, ‘brotherhood’, or ‘humanity’. They no longer know what ‘human rights’ are. I mean, what does this have to do with them! Their daily duty is to clap and shout for Big Brother: ‘With our soul, with our blood, we will sacrifice ourselves for you, oh Saddam.’ . . . Their only preoccupation is to survive and to live, like sheep. The preservation of their heads seated on top of their shoulders and the filling of their empty stomachs is enough.” The final analogy to sheep and animal existence is apt here. It is, perhaps, particularly characteristic of what signifies the peculiarly human form of existence that existentially lived time is a possibility at all. The synthesis, as Aristotle once remarked, of past and present and future in memory is notable and it allows for the possibility that experience can transcend the immediate. It allows for something we might call human existence. There was a moment before the fall of Baghdad when the Minister of Information, having become frustrated with Arabic, Western, and any other form of media, simply uttered “Don’t believe anything!” It was, perhaps, not exactly what he meant to say but it captures something of the nihilism that a failed totality represents.

When the Left was at its height in the past century it synthesized a dream of the future with a commentary on the present that was, at times, a remarkable balance between possibility and actuality. It managed to zero in on the failures of what is and then project them into visions of what could be. It had a mastery of existentially lived time. But part of that vision died at the Gulag where there is no time at all and part has simply faded into abstract negation and meaningless slogans and warnings about a future that no one can say much about.

What there is right now for the Left, should it choose to accept it, is a defense of the very space of possibility itself, and that means a defense of the possibility of existentially lived time. For that space is precious as such and that space is the space from which the new dreams about what human beings can do and achieve will emerge. It is a less ambitious dream than the transformative dreams of the past but it is true to a time, this time. In that sense we are all liberals now. But liberals toward what? It is in answering the ‘what’ that things will get interesting again.

Morgan Meis is an OTR Editor.