Taki Magazine

Insufferable Historicism

by Mark Hackard on July 01, 2009

The recent crises in Iran and Honduras have produced plenty of rhetoric in Washington, very little of it constructive or relevant to actual US interests. Official statements do remind us of the vision of history held by the governing classes and diffused among the population at large.

Commenting on the post-election riots in Iran last week, Sen. John McCain said that the US must be on “the right side of history” in doing something (what, exactly?) for “human rights and values”. McCain mentioned the Prague Spring and the Greek War of Independence as precedents justifying his demand for a more confrontational line.

Meanwhile, in response to the Honduran army’s removal of that country’s leader Manuel Zelaya, President Obama was quick to warn,

“We do not want to go back to a dark past…We always want to stand with democracy.”

In the worldview of people from Obama to McCain, history is a glorious march forward, a progressive arc into the radiant future demanded by reason and built by individuals like protestors and human rights activists (according to left-liberals) or corporate titans, consumers and the men and women of the US armed forces (according to right-liberals). The dark ages have ways of reappearing in other countries to temporarily impede the forces of progress, but the dialectic must inexorably advance, whether by trade talks and dialogue, or sanctions and bombardment. It’s just a matter of time, you see, before they’ll be drinking Pepsi and enjoying fabulous parades and “reproductive rights”. They’ll eventually evolve to our more enlightened state, the thinking goes, and we’ll help them along the way.

The historicism implicit in the mindset of our elites derives from Left-Hegelianism and a debased, secularized imitation of Christian eschatology, topped off with a liberal-democratic endgame articulated by Francis Fukuyama. What has come to be generally known as Whig history and its theory of progress are rarely if ever challenged in mainstream society. After all, before the financial crisis the supply of credit was supposed to be practically unlimited, and economic expansion was guaranteed by its own logic.

Here’s an idea: perhaps the administration could formulate a ground-breaking new doctrine of benign intervention in which the democratic revolution, since its legitimacy is obvious to all, would be consolidated and protected. That way, the advance of history in “developing” nations like Afghanistan would never be in doubt.

While a little McCain goes quite a long way, he made one other telling statement regarding Iran:

“America’s position in the world is one of moral leadership,” the senator said. “It’s not about what takes place in the streets of Iran. It is about what takes place in America’s conscience.”

It is indeed all about us. A way of thought that places at the center of existence man and his process of becoming, the movement toward sacrosanct liberation and equality he has divined by his own reason and will, is truly a function of cosmic narcissism.

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