The West isn’t alone in fetishising the past. China, having realised that capitalism transforms society less than it makes it unequal, is revisiting Maoism. Russia is exploring gung-ho ethno-nationalism.

From Game of Thrones to the First World War, history has become a fantasy fetish

By Tim Stanley * 

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I’ve written a lot recently about how history is being used and abused, andI’ve just stumbled across an essay by the late French philosopher Jean Baudrillard that offers some fascinating thoughts on the subject. This is a long quote but worth meditating upon:

Whereas so many generations, and particularly the last, lived in the march of history, in the euphoric or catastrophic expectation of a revolution – today one has the impression that history has retreated, leaving behind it an indifferent nebula, traversed by currents, but emptied of references. It is into this void that the phantasms of a past history recede, the panoply of events, ideologies, retro fashions – no longer so much because people believe in them or still place some hope in them, but simply to resurrect the period when at least there was history, at least there was violence (albeit fascist), when at least life and death were at stake. Anything serves to escape this void, this leukemia of history and of politics, this hemorrhage of values – it is in proportion to this distress that all content can be evoked pell-mell, that all previous history is resurrected in bulk – a controlling idea no longer selects, only nostalgia endlessly accumulates: war, fascism, the pageantry of the belle epoque, or the revolutionary struggles, everything is equivalent and is mixed indiscriminately in the same morose and funereal exaltation, in the same retro fascination. There is however a privileging of the immediately preceding era (fascism, war, the period immediately following the war – the innumerable films that play on these themes for us have a closer, more perverse, denser, more confused essence). One can explain it by evoking the Freudian theory of fetishism (perhaps also a retro hypothesis). This trauma (loss of referentials) is similar to the discovery of the difference between the sexes in children, as serious, as profound, as irreversible: the fetishization of an object intervenes to obscure this unbearable discovery, but precisely, says Freud, this object is not just any object, it is often the last object perceived before the traumatic discovery. Thus the fetishized history will preferably be the one immediately preceding our "irreferential" era. Whence the omnipresence of fascism and of war in retro – a coincidence, an affinity that is not at all political; it is naive to conclude that the evocation of fascism signals a current renewal of fascism (it is precisely because one is no longer there, because one is in something else, which is still less amusing, it is for this reason that fascism can again become fascinating in its filtered cruelty, aestheticized by retro).

Okay, so Baudrillard is notorious for using long words – often apparently in the wrong order – with the purpose of bamboozling the reader into thinking he has a point. But he really does. The argument is this:

1. Throughout the modern period (say, 1789 to 1989) people on both Left and Right thought history was moving forward towards a utopian end. They were living in an exciting age of transition.

2. The death of ideology apparently ended the sense of forward movement, trapping us in a liberal, capitalist limbo.

3. Desiring a return of idealism, people therefore look back into history and admire periods in which people seemed to be living for something.

4. This can breed extremism by romanticizing socialism, theocracy or fascism. But in most cases it just leads to people longing for the return of a past understood out of context. This gives rise to mythology.

That we currently live in a limbo is certainly true. The consensus in the West is that we’ve discovered the limits of what our society can achieve, and what we’re mostly engaged in now is conservation of the status quo (the environmentalist movement is the most radical example of this trend). Think of how many times the Left is told that it can’t nationalise things or even apply a small tax to international banking. Or how often the Right is informed that abortion on demand is here to stay or that a country withdrawing from the European Union is a fantasy. The opposition to the desire of Scottish nationalists to leave the UK is couched not in romantic pleas to brotherhood but a threat that independence is fiscally unsound. The threat ought not to fail, as material concerns never stopped America, India or Africa from seeking their independence. But in this oppressively rationalist age, it might just work. Live Free or Die now enjoys less power than Live Unfree and Keep Interest Rates Low.

So where can we find a little romance? In the past.

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Read more: blogs.telegraph.co.uk




* Tim Stanley (Wikipedia)

Politics

Stanley joined the British Labour Party at the age of 15. He was Chair of Cambridge University Labour Club in 2003-4, and stood as the Labour candidate for his home constituency of Sevenoaks at the 2005 general election, where he came third. He has since distanced himself from the Labour Party,[11] and has been arguing in support of the US Republican Party.[12][13]

Personal life

In October 2012, Stanley stated he was "raised a good Baptist boy".[14] Later, he considered himself to be an Anglican, beginning around "one glorious summer" in 2002, and was baptized as an Anglican in Little St. Mary's, Cambridge in New Year 2003. He later aligned himself with the Church of England's Anglo-Catholic wing.[15] He has since converted toRoman Catholicism.[16]