Remembering Jonathan Lear A vision of the future must never be only about the future. Otherwise we will commit the terrible mistake known as futurism, which is nothing more than an attempt to make a virtue out of velocity. Whether in the form of impatience or dread, the future can deplete the life out of the present, and no less ravenously than the present can deplete the life out of the past. It makes no sense to believe in a mode of time. To believe in the future is to believe in a cipher, or to perpetuate the illusion that the future will be one thing, this and not that, when in truth it will be everything, as all life is everything. And to believe in the past is also to believe in everything, because everything may be found in the past. The past does not all go together and neither will the future. (This is abundantly demonstrated by the historical origins of every innovation, by every “unprecedented” breakthrough. Chemists may look with contempt upon alchemists, but the science of chemistry was born in the superstition of alchemy, and for a while they coexisted in an incongruous explosion of the desire to know.) Until we make decisions about what we wish to retain and to cultivate from the past, until we make selections from among the survivals, until we impose some italics on the welter, the past is only a pile of events — an annals and not a history. It is only rich clay. But on what grounds can we make such selections? Only on ahistorical grounds, I would say; on philosophical grounds. And what certifies these philosophical grounds as criteria for our commitments is not that we find them in the past. The fact that certain values once existed and once animated a society does not establish their legitimacy. Their pastness teaches nothing about their correctness. Evil communities also had elders. Venerability verifies nothing, though their possible irrelevance to truth is no excuse for the wanton destruction of inherited beliefs. And contemporaneity, too, verifies nothing. Conservatism — remember conservatism?— is no less selective about the past than progressivism, and no less committed to the future. The distinction between conservatism and progressivism lies in the philosophical criteria for choices among the many legacies. We have no right to erase something old merely because it displeases us; the erasure of disagreeable survivals of the past — statues, etc. — will establish not justice, but only a chimera of innocence. The grand telos of all the history that came before us was not to affirm us. We are the past’s stewards, not its tyrants; its stewards and its interpreters. There is no point in fighting its facticity, its finality. And what we gain from our stewardship of the remains of evil is knowledge, which is one of the conditions of responsibly established belief. Iconoclasm has a sterling reputation for its independence of mind, but it is also a variety of vandalism. Where were the independent of mind in the iconoclastic mobs? Consider, for example, the paintings of the sixteenth-century iconoclastic riots in the Low Countries, particularly in Antwerp. They give the lie to the categorical loftiness of iconoclasm. They depict only power and hatred. Spit, abhor, but don’t demolish. A mile away, as I write this, the East Wing of the White House is being transformed into a heap of dust. Not a catastrophe by any means, and nothing like the rubble that one encounters in other locations in this roughed-up world. At least the local debris is not the work of war. But this demolition is certainly a perfect emblem of the Trump regime’s flippancy toward the past. Historical figures should be less casual about history, which normally should serve as a quarry for the inhibitions that are among their qualifications for office. An inhibition is often the expression of an appropriate reverence. An uninhibited man is an ahistorical man. There is something essentially disrespectful, essentially callous, about a rampaging backhoe, as there is about a rampaging president. Our power over the past is so immense that often we prefer not to know that the responsibility for what endures is ours. Secular and religious doctrines of inevitability relieve us of the anxiety of stewardship, not least by providing us with alibis for obsolescence, as if certain things are simply doomed to disappear, destined by time or by science or by providence. But nothing is obsolete until we agree that it is obsolete. We make it so. We let it go. The inheritance of the past and the reception of the past are two discrete moments. The former is passive, but the latter is, or must be, active. Without active reception, tradition expires. Culture advances when we revolt against the heir’s passivity, when we refuse to certify raw contingencies and we rise above our apathy about the flow of things. Allowing valuable pieces of the past to slip through your fingers is worse than melodramatically discarding them. Natural oblivion, the passing of memory with the passing of the years, is a permanent feature of human experience, and it may also be a blessing by leaving room for those who come after us, who would otherwise face an extremely discouraging sense of their own redundancy, the asphyxiating feeling that there is nothing left for them to say or to do. Yet there is also unnatural oblivion, which is what we wreak upon the past with our laziness and our indifference. Unnatural oblivion can also be the consequence of persecution and oppression. We not only neglect and forget our own patrimonies, other people sometimes attempt to erase them, to coerce oblivion, so that the development of certain cultures, particularly the cultures of oppressed peoples, must proceed not least by means of salvage. And we sometimes attempt to coerce oblivion on others. Finding a responsible position among the generations is a matter of calibrating the feeling
There's nothing Artificial about our Intelligence