The End of Revolution
Dear Dad,
Well, that message would have been the right place to stop. After Karl Marx
and the Revelation of Saint John, anything else is going to be a bit of an
anticlimax. But I'll take a stab at it anyway, and finish, in the spirit of the
family, and maybe even the Breakfast Table, not with a last word, but with a
last question. Are we at the End of Eschatology?
Let me explain what I mean. At the beginning of the decade, Fukuyama put
forward his famous thesis about how we were at the End of History, only to see
History seem to resume with a vengeance, as you put it the other day. But he
was obviously onto something. I would call it the end of revolution. It was
only a little over 200 years ago that the modern idea of revolution developed:
that is, the idea that society, and perhaps even human nature, could be rapidly
altered and improved through concerted political action. It has its origin, as
much as anywhere, in Rousseau. "The passing from the state of nature to the
civil society," he wrote, "produces a remarkable change in man; it puts justice
as a rule of conduct in the place of instinct, and gives his actions the moral
quality they previously lacked." Here, in these remarkable words, is the seed
of modern radical politics, the promise that brute human nature and selfish
instinct can be overcome, given the proper political system. The French
Revolutionaries believed in it, and talked of the "new man" (nu?). So did the
Russian Revolutionaries.
This promise, that people can be suddenly and purposefully redeemed and
lifted above their sinful natures, is a profoundly Christian one. And it is no
accident that the idea of revolution arose at a moment when the terrible fires
of religious conflict had burnt out in Europe, and European thinkers had
largely concluded that forcibly imposing possible Christian salvation on
doctrinal enemies was not worth the enormous cost in blood and toil that two
centuries of religious warfare had taken (the Thirty Years' War alone reduced
the population of Germany by as much as 25 percent). It was called an age of
"anti-enthusiasm" (i.e. religious enthusiasm). But in this vacuum, a new form
of enthusiasm quickly emerged, along with a new, quasi-Christian eschatology,
in the idea of revolution. There would still be a New Jerusalem, although a
purely terrestrial one. There would still be Final Things, and a direction to
history.
But now, after two centuries that have seen far greater suffering than the
religious wars ever caused, in the pursuit of this new New Jerusalem (what is
Wallenstein, next to Stalin?), revolution, too, is at an end. The central and
eastern European reformers of 1989 were very careful not to label what
they were doing a "revolution." Revolutions don't work, wrote the Pole Jacek
Kuron in the French newspaper Liberation , pointedly on the
200 th anniversary of the French Revolution of 1789. Today, hardly
anyone outside of Havana and Pyongyang talks about using politics to change
human nature, or even suddenly and drastically to improve society. In that
sense, we are all conservatives now, and in another age of anti-enthusiasm.
But will new enthusiasms arise once again, and if so, from where? Will there
be new promises of liberation, human fulfillment, and Final Things? Or are we,
therefore, at the End of Eschatology?
Love,
David
