******************** POSTING RULES & NOTES ********************
#1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message.
#2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived.
#3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern.
*****************************************************************
NY Times Op-Ed, June 4 2016
No, He’s Not Hitler. And Yet ...
by Justin E.H. Smith
We are supposed to find some solace these days in the assurance that
Donald Trump is “not Hitler.” One reasonable response is this: Of course
he isn’t. Only Hitler is Hitler, and he died in a bunker in 1945. There
is no such thing as reincarnation, and history is nothing more than a
long, linear series of individual people and events that come and go. It
is, as the saying goes, “just one damn thing after another.”
This quip is in part a rejection of the idea that history is, or might
someday be, a sort of science in which we subsume particular events
under general laws. This idea motivated Hegel to conceptualize human
history as a law-governed dialectical process of the “unfolding of
absolute Spirit.”
Marx in turn eliminated the ghost from Hegel’s system, and conceived the
process of history as one of material relations between classes. But it,
too, remained bound by general laws, so that when any historical actors
did this or that (crossed the Rubicon, repealed the Edict of Nantes,
etc.), they did so not so much as individuals, but as vessels of a
historical process that would be unfolding even if they had never existed.
Even when Marx facetiously riffs on Hegel’s claim that historical facts
and personages always appear twice — by adding that they do so the first
time as tragedy and the second time as farce — he is still perpetuating
the very serious idea that individual people and happenings in history
are instances of something more general.
But what would it mean for the “same event” to happen again? What are
the criteria of sameness? How alike do two individuals have to be in
order to be paired? How much does this repetition depend on the
individuals themselves, and how much on the similarity of external
circumstances? Can we really compare the United States at present to the
late Roman Empire or to the Hittites just before their collapse, given
how much we know to have changed in human societies since antiquity?
With the depressing confirmations of Godwin’s Law that can be found
every day in the comments sections of news outlets (surely, this article
will be no exception), one often senses that “Hitler” is not so much a
historical figure as a mythological one, that the war of 70-some years
ago has already become something like the Trojan War had been for the
Homeric bards: a major event in the mythic past that gives structure and
sense to our present reality. As in myth, that great event’s personages
can appear and reappear not in the exact form they took back then, but
as avatars, in new forms, under new names.
History seems to present us with a choice between two undesirable
options: If it is just one singular thing after another, then we can
derive no general laws or regularities from it, and so we would seem to
have no hope of learning from it; but when we do try to draw lessons
from it, we lapse all too easily into such a simplified version of the
past, with a handful of stock types and paradigm events, that we may as
well just have made it up. History seems to be a pointless parade of
insignificant events until we shape it into something that has
significance for us, until we build myths out of it, until we begin
using it to make up stories.
This is what makes it so easy and tempting to weaponize history, to
forgo any interest in “how it actually was” — to use the 19th-century
historian Leopold von Ranke’s definition of the true goal of the study
of history — and to bend it toward our own present ends.
Today Donald Trump excels at treating the past as raw material to be
sculpted into whatever claims serve his interests — for example, when he
shifts President Obama’s birthplace from Hawaii to Kenya. But the idea
that history is infinitely malleable is by no means the exclusive
property of xenophobic populists. Until very recently it was common to
hear from skeptics (in academia and elsewhere) that history is a
“narrative,” and that we must not expect the facts themselves to dictate
to us what version of history we ought to adopt. The facts are
inaccessible, it was said, so let us tell stories, and create our reality.
By the early 2000s, as announced in an influential article by the French
theorist Bruno Latour, this skeptical attitude had produced some
unintended consequences. For one thing, it had fallen into the hands of
“the enemy”: Creationists were invoking skeptical arguments to undercut
the epistemological basis of evolutionary theory; neoconservatives were
openly declaring themselves free of any obligation to what was now
mockingly called “reality,” as they had taken it upon themselves to
create a new reality of their own liking by, for example, invading Iraq
and, so they had hoped, planting the seeds of Jeffersonian democracy
there. And after Sept. 11, 2001, as Latour quickly began to notice,
people of all political stripes were rushing to attribute responsibility
for the attacks to whatever party or supernatural force best indulged
their fantasies about how the world works.
The degeneration of which Mr. Trump is a symptom is by no means limited
to American political life. If Trump is not a reincarnation of Hitler,
he is most certainly one head of the same global Hydra that has already
given us Vladimir V. Putin, Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Narendra Modi. For
all of them, the past is not something to study and to attend to, but
something to sculpt.
The leader of India, Mr. Modi, for example has brought about, through
support of the ideology of Hindutva, a political climate in which Indian
nationalist academics can claim that airplanes are described in the
millenniums-old Vedas without being ridiculed or marginalized. Mr. Trump
is seeking to bring about a climate in which equally false claims may go
unchallenged, in the name, purportedly, of something much more important
than mere empirical fact: making America “great again.” The invocation
of the past in this slogan is obviously mythological. No one will ever
call on him to cite any dates or figures to back it up.
History has always been prone to such deformations. In the 16th century
the Spanish Jesuit Jerónimo Román de la Higuera forged a cache of
documents meant to prove the antiquity of Christianity in the Iberian
Peninsula. Far from falling into notoriety when his inventions were
uncovered, he instead went on to even greater fame as the author of the
“falsos cronicones,” the false chronicles, which were only the more
glorious in that the claims they made were not dependent on mere factual
truths of history, but spoke of a “higher truth,” coming directly from
God. There is a long tradition in fact of the so-called pia fraus: the
pious fraud.
Mr. Trump is banking on the American public’s willingness to revert to
such a conception of truth that does not require any basis in fact. And
it is here that a bit of von Ranke’s hardheadedness can serve as a
corrective. We can worry later about drawing significant lessons from
history, about finding meaning for our lives in the past. For now what
is crucial is to insist that the past can be known — that Mr. Obama was
not born in Kenya, that climate change was not made up by the Chinese
and that anyone who pretends the opposite, as part of a larger plan to
make America great again, is, as a matter of simple historical fact, an
impious fraud and a liar.
The task that faces American voters at the present moment is enormous:
to save the United States from the same post-democratic order to which
parts of Europe and most of Asia has already fallen. Our relationship to
history will play no small role in this. History may be rooted in
storytelling, but we can summon it to be something more — the arbiter of
truth against lies told in pursuit of power.
Mr. Trump himself appears indifferent to history, as well as to the
grave significance of the comparisons of him to Hitler. It’s true that
Donald Trump is not Hitler. But the fact that the comparison has any
traction at all, that it is a recognizable part of our new political
dialogue, and that the man at its center is not actively seeking to
prove it wrong, shows how severe the current crisis is, and hints at how
dark the future might get.
Justin E. H. Smith is a professor of philosophy at the University of
Paris 7–Denis Diderot, and the author, most recently, of “The
Philosopher: A History in Six Types.”
_________________________________________________________
Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm
Set your options at:
http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
