Saturday, April 28, 2012

Standing Athwart Railway Tracks....

I have been a consumer of science fiction for my entire life, and I am a history major. Both have complemented themselves well. Both give a perspective to the world.

William Buckley's defintion of a conservative: "Someone who stands athwart history yelling stop."

I think about this quote from time to time.

There's a significant problem with that statement.

You can't. Or rather, you can, but do not expect anything to come of it.

See, history dosen't care about you. It dosen't care what you think of what it is doing. It just does things. Holding up one period of history as objectively desirable to live in or worthy of emulation dosen't work. When examined such time periods possess things we do not like and wish to discard, to be replaced by what we do. Part of the reason I don't like fantasy: its dishonest.

We no longer live in an age of feudalism; the people of the Middle Ages could not concieve of any social arrangements greater than the one we are living in. We're in a very painful transitional phase, hopefully for the better ("progress" sad to say does not entail "progressive").

The industrial world is becoming post-industrial; the developing world is becoming developed. We're drifting further apart yet are knitted more closer together. They way the world always has worked, like it or not.

One problem I have with the afterlife is the idea that everyone who every lived in history would live cheek-to-jowl with everyone else who ever lived. Would we get along? The fantasy is that every medieval serf would relish the opportunity to throw off the shackles of vassaldom and live similar lives to our own, but I think many serfs would be horrified at the lives we live now, the almost unimaginable freedom.

The problem I have with conservativism is that it is fundamentally based on a paradox: that we can force the world to stop because we've adopted fundamental, eternal values. History dosen't work like that. You cannot wrestle history to a standstill.

No, what we must do is adapt. We have to adapt our values to the times we live in and the times yet to come. We have to accomodate our values to the world as opposed to forcing the world to accomodate them.

Insisting the opposite is like stradling train tracks and demanding that a train stop because you are so assured about your ideals. It won't work and all that it will leave is a mess.