Perfect Pasts and Perfect Futures
Moorcock's political scepticism for golden ages behind us or yet to come
“There are many legends which say the past was perfect or that the future will be perfect. I have seen many pasts and many futures. None of them were perfect, my friend.”
- Michael Moorcock, The King of the Swords
The last of the existentialist novelists, Michael Moorcock, developed a great scepticism for the mythos of conventional politics. His fantasy novel The King of the Swords is particularly damning of the ways in which political parties manipulate individuals into lending their support. One way of interpreting the ending of that book is that freedom for humanity requires abandoning dependence upon politicians to save us. Famous political figures frequently appear in Moorcock’s fantasy novels caricatured as gods, and the end of this particularly tale sees the destruction of all the ‘silly gods and their silly schemes’.
The quote above projects the conventional logic of the political right and left into a fantastical setting. The traditional mythos of the right is to view the past as a lost golden age that ought to be rekindled or preserved in some way - we talk about this perspective as ‘conservative’ precisely because it seeks to conserve something of this perfect past. The traditional mythos of the left, however, is to project the golden age into the future, to see the steps we need to take in order to progress towards utopia - hence the name progressive. Both conveniently ignore the many problems of that imagined past, and the unknown risks of pursuing that imagined future.
Moorcock rejects both these approaches as dangerously simplistic. The entire mythology of his Eternal Champion stories is precisely that we must sometimes fight for Law (conservative causes, the state) and sometimes for Chaos (progressive causes, revolution) but that disaster befalls us if we ever associate one side or the other of this Cosmic Balance with ‘good’ and the other with ‘evil’. Moorcock’s characters are forever trapped in the political struggles of our world projected into fantasy metaphors.
Politicians allude to perfect pasts and futures to manipulate people into taking up their banner. Moorcock, more than most political philosophers, saw clearly the risks that followed from doing so - and the equal risks of never doing so. Central to his view of history is that while it is possible for individuals to change the course of events, they can do so solely with an immense effort, and even then with no guarantee of success, nor any certainty that the attempt will not devolve into carnage. Moorcock suggests that the struggle may still be worthwhile, in part because when we fail to take a stand against injustice, we damage our very humanity.
The twenty first century has found yet another way to deceive us with imaginary pasts and futures: the computer model. Such software systems masquerade as empirical research but are merely a means of avoiding the hard work entailed in such investigations. Every computer model encodes the prior assumptions of those who programmed it, thus to treat such models as predictive without further evidence is foolish. To treat them as definitive can be calamitous. Formal guesswork is mistaken for an oracle, and anyone who distrusts the soothsayer blasphemes. Scientific investigation perverted into authoritarian astrology.
At least with the old politics Moorcock warns us about, we were permitted to choose which deceit we wished to be hoodwinked by: the perfect past of the conservatives, or the perfect future of the progressives. We might be fooled into imagining only the best of the past, or presuming a risk-free path into the future, but it was still our choice. The apocryphal disasters foretold by the computer models of the New Normal snuff out even that decision, such that the question of which fantasy of perfection we wish to imagine no longer matters. All that is left is the ever-present threat of a calamity that will certainly come to pass if we ever cease to comply with these dire digital warnings.
Whether it is political visions of the past and future or their computer-generated successors, we are forever surrounded by attempts to persuade us of what is necessary, rhetorical phantasms of what was, what is, or what may be. Moorcock scepticism of the political dreams of past and future applies just as well to computer modelling, the latest tools of ‘silly gods and their silly schemes’. Rather than a lost golden age or a coming utopia, life is remains a perpetual struggle for balance.
Yes, yes, and again yes.
But WHY are both conservatism and progressivism necessary for the long-term survival of civilization? I think the answer lies in the way that human brains have come into existence.
Many different dimensions can be crafted to model how human brain/minds function.[1] Conservative/Progressive is one. Healthy societies keep this dimension in balance by see-sawing. Declining societies don’t. The fundamental reason that this is so is that human minds deal only with the chimera of reality, not reality itself. Human minds are also limited by the chaotic way our brains function.
An interesting footnote:
The megaphone power of media can easily create false images of what is. One antidote is sincere, personal, from the trenches, accounts. Realistically, how woke are some of our prestigious colleges? “My Liberal Campus Is Pushing Freethinkers to the Right” by Adam Hoffman in today’s NYT presents a sincere view.
Note
[1] Enchanted America: How Intuition & Reason Divide Our Politics, J. Eric Oliver, UofChicago Press 2022