The Past, the Future, and The Violence of Hope

In this episode we start addressing some of the serious problems with utopian thinking and, especially, progressive narratives. We unpack a bit of Walter Benjamin's "Theses on the Philosophy of History," return to Barthes regarding myth, and bring a little Nietzsche and some Star Trek into the conversation as well.

Obligatory bibliography, or books (and articles) you may also want to check out:

Benjamin, Walter, and Hannah Arendt. 1968. Illuminations. New York: Schocken Books.
Bergson, Henri. 1911. Matter and Memory. . Translated by Nancy Margaret Paul and William Scott Palmer. [New York]: Digireads.com.
Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm. 1910. The Gay Science. Dover ed. Mineola, N.Y.: Dover Publications.

Overthink Podcast: Walter Benjamin on Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility: https://youtu.be/WqsyvK_2eYo?si=Mq4rJKmz0JhJjgKx

Theory and Philosophy: The Angel of History | Walter Benjamin: 
https://youtu.be/7iYszscVduI?si=sPkYF0tiiNsacOR6

Neil deGrasse Tyson on rejection from Jury Duty (the third time), short remix clip from Joe Rogan: https://youtube.com/shorts/yrCTrB-HSfQ?si=PZsMJF_lJI7qh64p 

Transcript

Hello, welcome, and thank you for checking out this episode of Philosophy Versus Work, the podcast that examines the Ethics of the “Work Ethic” and other philosophical and socio-political questions regarding Work, Life, and Death. I am Michael Murray and I’ll be your guide on this philosophical journey. 

Episode 12: The Past, the Future, and The Violence of Hope

Those old capricious fancies, friend!

You say your palate naught can please

I hear you bluster, spit and wheeze,

My love, my patience soon will end!

Pluck up your courage, follow me – 

Here’s a fat toad! Now then, don’t blink!

Swallow it whole, nor pause to think!

From your dyspepsia you’ll be free!

A Cure for Pessimism. From “Jest, Ruse, and Revenge,” Friedrich Nietzsche,  Der Fröhliche Wissenschaft, The Gay Science. 

When thinking about the future, as an avid Trekkie (a Star Trek fan, for those layfolk listening out there and unfamiliar with the term, though fan is putting it lightly) I often think of the Trek prologue, “Space, the final frontier…” yada, yada, “…to boldly go where no one has gone before!” I mean, talk about a call to action! (it certainly beats the backward looking ‘a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away…’ – take my sarcasm for what it is, I love Star Wars too, and yes, love both you can)

Star Trek, and, judging from conversations I’ve had with other fans as well as stories I’ve heard from cast members about their interactions with fans, stands up as some of the best of what good science fiction can do; it tackles serious, contemporary social, political, and philosophical issues (hell, you could teach a seriously in depth Intro to Philosophy course just from episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation (TNG)), but does so through story, metaphor, and implication, to make the topic more palatable to a broad audience, potentially opening people’s hearts and minds to points of view that differ from their deeply held beliefs or providing a welcoming space for those who feel different, ostracized, etc. Does it always work? No. Especially the further back you go in Trek history, the more you’re likely to see the impacts of network censors or business daddies from CBS and/or Paramount reining it in. Or, conversely, consider the recently wrapped Star Trek: Discovery series (and, problematic 1st season science and aesthetic decisions aside) wound up both deeply beloved by fans and deeply reviled by its critics (largely of a political nature, rather than film/TV criticism) that ranted about it’s ‘wokeness’, that they dared to have strong female, LGBTQ characters in the crew’s senior staff and that the show wore its ethics on its sleeve. Now, do I think the in-your-face ethics was a bit much? Yes, but I, as a fan, was much more put off by the first season’s handling of space travel via spore network and the drastic revision of the Klingons. My concern with the in-your-face ethics is just that I think one of Science Fiction’s greatest strengths as a genre is its subversiveness. On the other hand, as to the anti-LGBTQ and anti-woke critics, come on, you claim to be a Star Trek fan and your problem is it’s “woke?” I’m really not trying to gatekeep here, but have you ever seen an episode of Star Trek? It’s been woke since before “woke” was a thing. 

But what Trek really does well, and this is going back to where I know I’m not alone in this opinion, is that it offers a hopeful vision of the future. Sure the galaxy is a dangerous and often violent and conflict ridden place, but humanity isn’t just competing with other species for survival or dominance, humanity is on the leading edge of building an egalitarian, interplanetary society based on collaboration and exploration, expanding knowledge in the sciences and arts, free trade of ideas (and goods), and, since it’s ultimately necessary, mutual defense. Humanity hasn’t just gotten over its own bullshit, the racism, sexism, greed, and exploitation, it’s spreading out into the galaxy to help others get over theirs. 

Well, this episode isn’t the rainbows and teddy bears of hope, so, here’s a different take on the same theme of going boldly into the unknown. 

“The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age..” –H.P. Lovecraft, The Call of Chthulu

In this episode we start addressing some of the serious problems with utopian thinking and, especially, progressive narratives (such as the one presented by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s 1968 speech at the National Cathedral, in which he famously noted, “the arc of the Moral Universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”)

Now, to be fair, I can’t claim credit for coining the phrase ‘the Violence of Hope.’ It was the title of a cross listed, Grad/Undergrad (different assignments, same readings/lectures) Religious Studies, Philosophy, MA Liberal Studies class I took back in 2015, taught by professors Dr. Joe Winters, now at Duke, and Dr. Kent Brintnall, still at UNCC. Here’s a bit of the course description from the syllabus, “It would seem that hope is the most basic desire. And, as a desire for a better, more just, more equitable future, it would seem that it is a commendable, or at the very least, neutral one. … Yet hope – especially when linked to a desire for recognition and respect – often enables the order of things to stay in place; it all too often attaches the hopeful to narratives, arrangements, and identities that are funded by violence, exclusion, and hierarchy. Hope, despite its relation to desire for change and transformation, may, from another perspective, be understood as an inherently conservative vice.”

The course surveyed some works from Hegel and Marx, Bataille, Freud, Theodore Adorno (now, we haven’t addressed anything by Adorno yet, so, in brief, he was a German philosopher and social critic exiled from Germany as a non-Aryan (his father had been German and Jewish but converted and his mother was a Corsican and Catholic), he was the director of the Institute for Social Research (the predecessor to the New School for Social Research in New York), had been a collaborator of Walter Benjamin’s (whom, I’m excited  that we’ll start working with today), Ernst Bloch, and frequently with Max Horkheimer; he principally wrote on social theory, authoritarianism and fascism, aesthetics, music theory, popular and mass media, and Marxism), the course also covered Lee Edleman’s No Future, which we’ll cover in the next episode, as well as Judith Butler and Franz Fanon – whom, though their work is rich in theory and critique, I don’t expect we’ll be working with either any time soon; but, hey, we’ll see how upcoming news cycles unfold, maybe we’ll have cause to go there. 

While Nietzsche wasn’t a focus of the class, I think some of his writing is valuable to integrate here. 

Now, before we get into the meat and potatoes of this episode, I want to highlight something about Progress and Progressive Narratives. Progress, when taken as progress-in-itself, can produce belief in history as progressive, which mutes much of the significance of loss, failure, and trauma. If we take Progress as natural (to pull Barthes back into the conversation, to mythologize progress), as in the example of Dr. King’s ‘arc of moral history,’ then we run risk of, rather than stopping, enabling oppression, violence, and exploitation. We run the risk of ‘thoughts and prayers’ when what we need to do is take action. Hope can be deeply conservative where it becomes a belief system; the ‘I know things are bad, but we have to have hope’ does nothing, by itself, but preserve the status quo. Also, it can become a serious vice, an opiate of sorts, that allows the believer to retreat from reality and try to take shelter in their hopes and beliefs that things will, eventually, change for the better. 

So, that’s the stakes. The real and continued harm that can be done by Hope without Action, a Hope that accomplishes nothing but preserving the status quo. Now we have to deal with the problem that justifies this kind of hope, progressive narratives, history as progress, the Myth of Progress. 

Again, you don’t need to listen to these episodes all in order, but it would definitely help to have listened to the two episodes on Barthes and Mythology to get what I mean by Myth of Progress, ‘cause I’m definitely leaning on Barthes a bit here, and he’s going to be coming up again. 

On the other hand, if you’ve already read Barthes, um, cool! Moving on!

Now, here’s a couple of questions to think about as we proceed:

Must the past live only in repetition?  Is history condemned to repeat itself?  Or, fade to myth?  What happens when mythology solidifies into ideology?

For the rest of this episode, I’m going to focus on some of these ideas from Benjamin, and Barthes as regards historical discourse, progressive narratives, and myth. 

Walter Benjamin, 1892 – 1940, was a German Jew and, and like Horkheimer and Adorno, and Herbert Marcuse (a theorist I’m sure we’ll get to eventually, his Eros and Civilization is a great counterpoint to Freud’s Civilization and its Discontents, which we’ll be unpacking in the next arc), a Frankfurt School Critical Theorist – when talking about capital C capital T Critical Theory, it begins with the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt, Germany – though, unlike his contemporaries, Benjamin didn’t make it out of Europe. He had fled Germany for Paris in 1933, then fled Paris for Spain, in an attempt to get to America, a few months after the Nazi occupation began. He had made it to the Spanish coast when Franco, dictator of Spain and ally of Hitler (and also strongly supported at the time by American conservatives, especially conservative Catholics, and isolationists – a group whose leadership, including some sitting US Congressmen, had close ties to Hitler and his propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels – as well as the leadership of some American companies such as the Texas Oil Company, now Texaco, General Motors, and, no surprise, Ford, led by renowned racist and antisemite Henry Ford). Franco ordered the revocation of all transit visas and the deportation of those persons to France. Rather than chance being turned over to either the Nazis or Vichy French police, Benjamin committed suicide by morphine overdose in his hotel room. Like Adorno, Benjamin was also writing on ethics and aesthetics, Marxism, social criticism, communism, and anti-fascism. The essay that got me particularly interested in Benjamin is “The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility,” which has been central to my thinking on contemporary and digital art as well as art in general, religion, and politics – and especially, the aestheticization of religion and politics, fascism, and propaganda. Dr. Ellie Anderson, of Pomona College, and host of the Overthink Podcast has a great, short episode, about 15 minutes, on this essay. I’ll drop a link to the YouTube video in the show notes. This essay doesn’t directly bear on the specific topic of this episode, but it does have some really interesting and important parallels regarding original, reproduction, and Benjamin’s concept of ‘aura’ and Barthes’ analysis of second order signs in myth and semiotics. 

Benjamin's "Theses on the Philosophy of History," though, is what I’m working with here, which sets up the concept of history itself as a site of struggle.  Due to this struggle, to prevail, it is crucial, Benjamin claims, to adopt the position of a historical materialist.  Specifically, the historian who approaches the study of history through its material reality – including, but not least of which being, its "cultural treasures" – the historical materialist is an historian that is careful to address the complex history of the object from its origins up to and including its present. 

Now, the theses themselves are 28 short arguments and insights, a paragraph a piece (save the last which has an A and B premise), sometimes opening with a quote from another philosopher, such as Hegel and Nietzsche, that together form Benjamin’s argument regarding what history itself is and why historical materialism is the proper way to do history. 

Thesis IV, “The class struggle, which is always present to a historian influenced by Marx, is a fight for the crude and material things without which no refined and spiritual things could exist. Nevertheless, it is not in the form of the spoils which fall to the victor that the latter make their presence felt in the class struggle. They manifest themselves in this struggle as courage, humor, cunning, and fortitude. They have retroactive force and will constantly call in question every victory, past and present, of the rulers. As flowers turn toward the sun, by dint of a secret heliotropism the past strives to turn toward that sun which is rising in the sky of history. A historical materialist must be aware of this most inconspicuous of all transformations.”

It’s critical to remember that history isn’t just a site of struggle now, both for the historian as well as for the present in general, it’s a history of struggle. History is a collection of the spoils of war, whether it is a physical war or a war of ideas. The rulers and the victors have made rubble of the material of history. 

History must also contend with survivorship bias, the tendency of viewing history not as it was, but under the terms of what has survived. If history is written by the victor, then it’s the task of the historical materialist to seek out the rubble and try to find, and preserve, what was erased, left behind, consigned to oblivion. As for spiritual things requiring the crude and material things to exist, well, first of all, as physical objects, these spiritual things are themselves also crude material, the spiritual is attributed not of themselves, but by our value judgments. Second, how can we know they are spiritual? Simple, because they survived where other objects were destroyed. The gods of one culture preserved, the gods of another erased. And so on. 

Quick aside on this, another thing that I was listening to regarding survivorship bias; if you turn on a classic rock station and you here the same songs over and over again and think, ‘that’s the entirety of the 70s, well, those were the hits from the 70s that survived. That doesn’t mean that was all the music from the 70s, that’s just the material, the spoils, that were kept. 

With history itself being a site of struggle, this is where Barthes comes back in. In his conclusion to Mythologies, Barthes states that 

“... there is as yet only one possible choice, and this choice can bear only on two equally extreme methods: either to posit a reality which is entirely permeable to history, and ideologize; or, conversely, to posit a reality which is ultimately impenetrable, irreducible, and, in this case, poetize. In a word, I do not yet see a synthesis between ideology and poetry (by poetry I understand, in a very general way, the search for the inalienable meaning of things).

The fact that we cannot manage to achieve more than an unstable grasp of reality doubtless gives the measure of our present alienation: we constantly drift between the object and its demystification, powerless to render its wholeness.”

Recall, Barthes was seeking the definition of things, not words. He was investigating the meanings of first and second order signs, in the manner of linguistics, as applied to all the material things of culture, including images and words. Also, a quick word on poetry as seeking the inalienable meaning of things. Without trying to explain a philosophy of poetry, this can be taken all the way back to Plato and his criticism of writing in the Phaedrus (one of Plato’s “Dialogues”) in which he criticizes writing as a poor form of rhetoric, that, ironically, was a written work. Rather than arguing his position through prose, Plato, it’s generally accepted, invented a new style of writing in the form of rhetorical dialogue, where his protagonist, Socrates, argues with other characters (some real, many fictitious) and often in a poetic form. Another interpretation of this comes from Heidegger’s analysis in “The Question Concerning Technology” regarding poeisis, as a creative bringing-forth into existence. So, as opposed to ideologizing – not merely mythologizing and replacing a sign’s meaning with another concept to serve one’s agenda, but ossifying, to make like stone, solid, impermeable, that myth – poetizing is to bring forth the inalienable meaning, a meaning that cannot be replaced, mystified, or subverted. 

If this is the case, that we must “constantly drift between the object and its demystification”, then it seems that we do historical materialism by seeking to reconcile this drift. Now, personally, I don’t believe we can ever do this fully, and I think Benjamin provides a great, if theoretically dense, explanation why in his ‘the Work of Art…’ essay I mentioned earlier. Without getting too much off the topic of progressive narratives and hope, in the Work of Art essay, Benjamin identifies what he calls the work of art’s “Aura.” The combination of what it is as well as its historical presence. DaVinci’s “Mona Lisa” isn’t simply a painting, it is its entire history, it’s DaVinci, the Renaissance, her mysterious smile, the Louvre, the Nazi occupation of Paris, the crowds that continue to flock to the Louvre today to catch a glimpse of it – by the way, if you really want a good look at it, and I’m going to hate sharing this secret, go to Paris in early March when the whether is still shit and the city isn’t flooded with tourists. I managed to get to the Louvre the last Saturday of a Spring Break in Paris Existentialism seminar, and there were maybe 40 other people in the room with me. It only took a few minutes for me to get right in front of it with an unobstructed view (save the thick security glass), and, it’s fine. I mean, don’t get me wrong, it’s a beautiful painting, but it’s a real study in ‘don’t meet your heroes.’ It’s small, especially compared to other monumental paintings really close to it, and all of the security around it, the glass plating, the velvet ropes, all make it difficult to get a good look at the fine detail and brushstrokes. But, the ‘aura’ is unmistakable, at least for an art lover, to be that close to a work of Leonardo DaVinci’s… that was pretty cool. I will also note though, it wasn’t close experientially to some other pieces I saw that day, like the Nike of Samothrace, possibly my favorite sculpture of all time, which stands on a plinth on a broad stairway landing at the end of a long hall, approaching it and finally seeing it in person nearly brought me to tears. Or Delacroix’s “Liberty Leading the People” – which according to the museum that whole hall’s contents had been pulled from display for a renovation, but that had apparently been completed early and the display re-opened. Back to the point, I believe it’s the historical object’s ‘aura’ that… intervenes in finally reconciling the drift between object and demystification, animating the drift from object to mystification. 

Okay, what does all of this talk about myth, poetry, and aura have to do with the violence of hope? Well, it’s not just myth as a type speech that one needs to be concerned about, but the threat that myth poses to history, through mythologizing, ideologizing, and naturalizing history, progress, and the future, by relegating the historical rubble and the replaced 1st order meanings to the dustbin of history… oblivion. 

Quick side note, I think the greatest representation, at least that I’ve ever seen, of oblivion is the Memory Dump from Inside Out. I won’t spoil the scene, just in case any of you listening still haven’t seen the first one – and if you haven’t, what are you waiting for? This movie really is great – but the whole idea of a literal trash heap of forgotten memories consigned to oblivion is just brilliant. Specifically the idea that these memories are not actually gone, only forgotten, and given the right stimuli, it’s possible some could be retrieved. 

So, back to Benjamin. 

In Benjamin’s fifth and sixth theses lies the greatest warning of what Barthes would later, in part, refer to as myth.  But as noted earlier, it is not just myth, but oblivion – likewise, it is not just ideology, but ideological subsumption the capacity for an ideology to subsume that which opposes it, kind of like a capitalist ‘entrepreneur’ selling t-shirts and bumper stickers with Karl Marx on them (I also now need to rewatch The Blob and see if it can hold up as a metaphor for unregulated capitalism… hmmm…) –the greatest threats that we, as a society, face; and as would-be mythologists and historical materialists, we must confront.  In the fifth thesis Benjamin warns the reader that… 

“The true picture of the past flits by. The past can be seized only as an image which flashes up at the instant it can be recognized and is never seen again. “The truth will not run away from us”: in the historical outlook of historicism [generally speaking, a branch of phenomenology that argues phenomena, especially social and cultural, are historically determined; but also, conversely, history as an ideology itself] these words of Gottfried Keller mark the exact point where historical materialism cuts through historicism. For every image of the past that is not recognized by the present as one of its own concerns threatens to disappear irretrievably. (The good tidings which the historian of the past brings with throbbing heart may be lost in a void the very moment he opens his mouth.)” 

The “true picture of the past” is the present.  It “flits by.”  It is here only in the specific moment, but lives on in memory and in the materials of history, or, to bring yet another philosopher into the conversation, Henri Bergson, matter and memory.  As such, the past never truly dies; but it is always endangered.  The past can always be lost, it can always be stolen, and, like the sign in myth, returned distorted.  The moment in which the “image of the past” – “and by ‘image’” I, to quote Bergson’s Matter and Memory, “mean a certain existence which is more than that which the idealist calls a representation, but less than that which the realist calls a thing” – flashes up, the image itself must be “seized.”   Not to do so is to risk losing the past to oblivion, or to distortion, to myth. And as far as the good tidings disappearing the moment the historian opens his mouth, well, that depends on what the historian of the moment utters. Think of this one like a photograph. The photo may appear to capture a moment in time, but that’s not actually true. It only captures what the photographer selected to capture within the frame. Everything outside the frame was, intentionally, left out, discarded. 

Or, you can think about scientific analysis on eyewitness testimony. It’s flawed. There are things that we remember and don’t remember, and things we remember… wrong. Neil deGrasse Tyson has a great story about a time he was dismissed from Jury duty, where when asked if anyone would have a problem convicting given the evidence - there wasn’t any, except for witness testimony - he raised his hand and noted he couldn’t, given the inherent flaws in witness testimony. The judge then followed up by asking if there was anyone else who ‘needed more witnesses’ - which was categorically not what deGrasse Tyson had just said to her - and was rebutted by another member of the jury that noted she just misquoted the other guy. I recommend looking it up. I’ll look for it before this goes live and see if I can drop a link for that one too.

Yet oblivion is not a destruction, oblivion is only the void.  Again, think “the Memory Dump” from Inside Out. It is forgetfulness, limbo, purgatory.  And it is from oblivion that the past – through its material history – must be rescued.  Benjamin goes on in the sixth thesis to explain how to do so, what it means to do so, and what is at risk not to do so. 

“To articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it “the way it really was” (quick aside, here Benjamin is citing 19th Century German historian, Leopold von Ranke, who was pretty critical to modern, Western historiography, but takes us off the point, back to thesis 6). It means to seize hold of a memory at the moment it flashes up at a moment of danger. Historical materialism wishes to retain that image of the past which unexpectedly appears to man singled out by history at a moment of danger. The danger affects both the content of the tradition and its receivers. The same threat hangs over both: that of becoming a tool of the ruling class… Only that historian will have the gift of fanning the spark of hope in the past who is firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he wins. And this enemy has not ceased to be victorious.” 

That moment of danger is the moment in which history risks sliding into oblivion – or worse, into myth.  If the past is to be conceived in terms of the present, as the moment in which the present flits by has passed, when the present ceases to be the immediate, and lives on only as an image – something between thing and representation – then in that same moment the past opens itself up to interpretation.  In this conception there are two possibilities, specifically, the possibility of seizing the past as history, or of filling the representation of the Past with its own concept by way of mythologizing (ignoring for the time the possibility of not interpreting and simply allowing the past to slide into oblivion, which, like being a consumer of myth, is an option).  

So, now we need to address Benjamin’s “enemy” endangering the past, that “ceased to be victorious.”  Now, for starters, it can’t be forgotten that Benjamin wrote the Theses in exile in early 1940, not long before France surrendered and the Nazis took Paris. Fascism didn’t rise to power overnight, but it had been, no small thanks to charismatic leaders relying on a politics of resentment, blame, and fearmongering -ahem- in the aftermath of World War One, utilized and usurped democratic processes to ascend to the heights of political power. I think it’s a weak interpretation of Benjamin to claim the “enemy” is Fascism and/or the Nazis, but certainly Benjamin included fascism and Nazism among the “enemy.”

And despite Trump’s and Vance’s current obsession with Democrats being – quote - Marxist Communist Fascists, Fascism is itself a far-Right ideology, fundamentally opposed to democracy, liberalism, socialism, and communism, that sees as it’s ultimate enemy, Marxist ideologies. A Marxist Fascist is not a thing. Have there been and are there authoritarian or totalitarian dictators that have claimed to be Marxists, Socialists, and Communists? Yes, certainly. It’s also logically nonsensical to pretend to uphold a free and ‘classless society’ in a strictly hierarchical, strictly and totally disciplinary police state. However, it’s categorically impossible to be a liberal, socialist, communist, or democrat and a fascist. These ideals are fundamentally at odds with each other. 

Now, I think there’s some interesting and nuanced concepts to include among Benjamin’s “enemy”; namely, true oblivion – the irretrievably lost among the rubble of history; mythical oblivion – the distortion and replacement of the original meaning; and ideological subsumption. Now, this last idea I’m going to hold off on for now and we’ll come back to it in the next couple of episodes. I think what Edelman has to say about the myths of the future and of the Child, and Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism, help to explain this idea better. Oblivion, Myth, and Ideology are the products of the enemy, the enemy itself is the ruling class that creates oblivion, myth, and ideology in their gathering of the spoils of history, in what they collect, what they leave behind or destroy, and in what they transform to fit their narratives. 

This, is where I think Nietzsche becomes important to include. Now, I don’t want to go too far off the rails here, this is already going to be a long-ish episode and we’re going to be revisiting Nietzsche in at least two episodes in the next arc, on his the Genealogy of Morality and on Deleuze’s Nietzsche and Philosophy, plus an episode on ressentiment and nihilism in the arc following that. 

Suffice to say, it is not just the ruling class that erases, mythologizes, and ideologizes history. Where, on the one hand, and in multiple works, Nietzsche refers to what he calls ‘the will to power’ (der Wille zur Macht), the animating force of life in humanity. Western morality, the ascetic morality of the priests; however, seeks to debase, to neuter the will to power, and is based instead on a weak will to power.  Resentment, ressentiment, the weak will to power also strives to form narratives, and these narratives, as we noted in the last episode, valorize weakness, subservience, self-denial, they scapegoat, blame one’s perceived lack of power on some other group; and while Nietzsche lays the primary fault of these kinds of narratives (and moralities) on religion and the priestly class, he also foreshadows the rise of grievance politics and fascism. 

Another quick aside, if you’re interested in the rise and, I won’t say fall so much as temporary stalling out, of fascism in the US, I strongly recommend Rachel Maddow’s Prequel: An American Fight Against Fascism. It’s a well-researched and well-told history of the far right in the US in the years between World War One and Two, with some particularly horrifying parallels between groups like the Republican isolationists, the Christian Front and the Silvershirts, and modern MAGA Republicans, Evangelicals, and groups like the Proud Boys. I will point out one, I think, particularly grievous fault in her writing, and that’s how she regards Nietzsche and his conception of the Übermensch, the ‘overman’ or ‘superhuman.’ Unfortunately, rather than referring directly to Nietzsche or scholarship regarding Nietzsche, she refers to Nazi and Fascist writing on Nietzsche, which was taken wholly out of context. Much of Nietzsche’s writing that was appropriated by the Nazis was unpublished and unfinished notes and manuscripts, written or left unfinished because Nietzsche was deteriorating and dying from syphilis, was given to the Nazis by Nietzsche’s sister, who was a Nazi sympathizer and married to a German Nationalist and antisemite – and, as we’re on the topic of erasure, myth, and ideology, while many modern Republicans have been trying to redeem or sanitize the term Nationalism, it’s important to remember that its use in the sense of the more benign ‘patriotism’ has been linguistically obsolete since about the 19th century, and especially from the early 20th century on, the term has referred to racial and/or religious bigotry as national identity. 

If we mythologize history and progress (and as Barthes’ 'readers, or consumers, of myths' this is precisely what I propose that we generally do), then, we enable both; 1. Ideas like MAGA, fueled by resentment and grievance, to turn us, (those of us subject to work, subject to capital, subject to a ‘ruling class,’ etc.., those whom Marx, following from the social classes of ancient Rome, dubbed the proletariat, the wage earners, the social class for whom their labor power is worth more to the economy than their wealth) against one another; and, 2. Ideas like ‘the arc of moral history that bends toward justice,’ that run risk of opiating our outrage against exploitation, racism, and violence. And this is all to say nothing yet about the dangers of religion and the enabling of violence and oppression that comes with deferring the value of life to an imagined life after death. 

Alright, one last note on Benjamin’s Theses; in the ninth thesis, he, and I’m paraphrasing a bit, refers to progress as a storm “blowing from Paradise” which is “irresistibly [propelling the Angel of History] into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris [the wreckage of history, which the Angel views as a single catastrophe rather than a sequence of events] before him grows skyward.”  Another YouTube channel, Theory and Philosophy, has a couple of videos on this worth checking out. I’ll leave a link to this in the show notes as well. They have one about 9 minutes on the Angel of History, and another about an hour long on Benjamin’s concept of history. 

Now, I argued in a couple of papers that one way of potentially getting out of this mess of myth and narrative, as regards progress, is that rather than reading Progress as something that is happening in the due course of civilization, or we are doing and/or aiming to accomplish in the future – which is itself heavily burdened by myth and narrative, which we’ll get into in the next episode – rather than reading Progress into the future, we should only read Progress historically. Calling back to the old inductive logic fallacy, just because it happened before, is no guarantee it will happen in the future. Authoritarianism and Totalitarianism haven’t simply been responses to wars or governmental failures, they’ve arisen, going back to ancient Greece, in response to increases in the rights and freedoms of the populace, the reaction of the ruling class – or a would-be ruling class – to their real, or perceived, diminution of power over others. 

On a lighter note, Benjamin refers specifically to a painting by Paul Klee titled “Angelus Novus” as the image of the Angel of History. Now, if “Angelus Novus” is how we can imagine the Angel of History, perhaps it is in, one of my favorite Romantic painters, Caspar Friedrich’s “Wanderer on the Mists” that we can imagine the Angel of the Future.  A figure, their feet planted solidly in the present moment, their back to us, staring off into the horizon, the field below shrouded in a dense mist, obscured from vision, but there, just out of reach.  Infinite possibility.  Figure and mist alike, unmoved by progress.  Waiting. Ready to go boldly, where no one has gone before. 

Alright, next episode, we continue this conversation, but we’re going to pivot to the myth of the Future, futurity, and the Child. That will also be coming out after the upcoming VP debate, so, be prepared for some commentary on not only Lee Edleman’s child-as-myth, but the cringe-fest of JD Vance’s politics of childless cat ladies – and as a Childless-cat-dad myself, you can bet I’ll be tuning in to that one. I’m half tempted to see if anyone’s written up some kind of childless-cat-lady drinking game to get through it. 

‘til next time. 

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