In his 2017 book On Tyranny, Timothy Snyder wrote that the fall of communism had led to the myth of an “end of history”. This in turn led us to accept the politics of inevitability and the notion that we were heading in one direction that would inexorably take us to the single possible destination of liberal democracy. In dropping our guard Snyder argues, we “constrained our imagination, and opened the way for precisely the kind of regimes we told ourselves could never return.”
People often glibly recite the trope that those who don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it, but this if true depends also on who is recording history and runs headlong into Hegel’s claim that we learn from history that we don’t learn from history. If taken as the weighing of evidence against interest; rather than inoculating us against repetition, history gives us a broader scope to understand the possible outcomes from any given set of circumstances. Snyder refers to it as a broader pallet from which to paint [1].
In what Snyder calls a second anti-historical way of considering the past, the politics of eternity provides a “masquerade of history”. It offers the romance and myths of the past, the canvases of national legends and a longing for epochs that were antithetical to their subsequent depictions.
“Eternity politicians bring us the past as a misty courtyard of illegible monuments to national victimhood, all of them equally distant from the present, all of them equally accessible for manipulation. Every reference to the past seems to involve an attack by some external enemy upon the purity of the nation.”
The manipulation of history has been instrumental in handing over two nations – which have at almost every turn defined themselves as standard bearers for all that is good – to the very forces they claim to have vanquished.
At a talk promoting his book “Heroic Failure: Brexit and the Politics of Pain” Fintan O’Toole summed up the politics of eternity as they have been worked into the selling of Brexit.
“A country that isn’t by any historical standards oppressed, imagines itself almost masochistically into a position that we’re being oppressed by these horrible people and therefore Brexit becomes an act of liberation. The problem is that if all you’ve been liberated from is fictional constraints then it doesn’t actually help you very much or make you any better off because the restraints were not real in the first place.”
The idea of returning to a British nation-state that never existed is peddled by cartoon spivs not dissimilar to Lord Haw Haw in what is actually a real attack on the nation carried out in plain sight. Such is the hypnotic draw of the charade that 83% of leave voters and 80% of Tories would be prepared for the Irish peace treaty to falter to facilitate Brexit. Real consequences triggered by fictional characters fighting for a return to a fictional past.
In the latter part of his talk O’Toole quoted French philosopher Ernest Renan as having said, – “A nation is a group of people held together by common misconceptions about their origins”. This rings true although there needs also to be some sort of mortar holding up the edifice of shared national identity however contrived. Perhaps this is the function of myth, ritual and ceremony which do have their place as long as you know what they are [2]. Is this where the politics of eternity have stepped in, dimmed the lights and persuaded the audience that the show is real life and the players should be taken at face value?
Another quote from Renan goes – “When people complain about life, it is almost always because they have asked impossible things of it.” So, as the clamour for a return to times that never really were finds its voice in social media and inane TV news vox-pops, it is almost inevitable that the dissatisfaction with democracy will grow and fiction will have to keep pace with it.
Clement Atlee once said – “Democracy means government by discussion, but it is only effective if you can stop people talking”.
So, as in the title of E.M.Forster’s 1951 book of essays – “Two cheers for democracy”.
- Timothy Snyder – On Tyranny. Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century.
- Fintan O’Toole – Heroic Failure: Brexit and the Politics of Pain
- [1] Timothy Snyder on the Sam HarrisWaking Up Podcast #79
Stephen Fry & Prof Richard Dawkins
