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'When a new higher stage arrives, there must be a squashed bird somewhere.' (The Prestige)
Early in Christopher Nolan’s The Prestige, a magician performs a trick with a small bird which disappears in a cage flattened on the table. A small boy in the audience starts to cry, distraught that the bird was killed. The magician approaches him and finishes the trick, gently producing a living bird out of his hand — but the boy is not convinced, insisting that this must be another bird, the dead bird’s brother. After the show, we see the magician alone, putting a bird squashed into the trash where many other dead birds lie. The boy was right. The trick could not be performed without violence and death, but it relies for its effectiveness upon concealing the squalid, broken residue of what has been sacrificed, disposing of it where no one who matters will see. Therein resides the basic premise of a dialectical notion of progress: when a new higher stage arrives, there must be a squashed bird somewhere.
The first thing to renounce is thus any notion of the global linear progress of humanity, whether formulated by Karl Marx, postulated by liberals like Francis Fukuyama (who declared the end of history) or dominated by Enlightenment dialectics. Marx’s overall vision of history is that of a linear succession of “progressive” modes of social development from primitive societies through the Asiatic mode of production, slavery, feudalism, capitalism to socialism and communism. Problems arise almost immediately with the historical dynamic Marx envisioned; to start with, the notion of an “Asiatic mode of production” is clearly problematic (it is an empty category into which Marx threw whatever didn’t fit his Eurocentric logic of history, and thus in itself a receptacle for squashed dead birds). As for socialism, Rosa Luxemburg’s claim that “the future will be socialism or barbarism” proved to be wrong also: what we got in Stalinism was a socialist barbarian, and the corpses are still being counted. As for liberalism, its state of crisis is obvious, so much so that even Fukuyama has renounced his notion of the end of history.
There should be no holds barred in the pursuit of squashed birds. Russia and China like to present themselves as partisans of a new multi-centric world order in which all ways of life will coexist as equal and in which Western colonial economic and ideological domination will finally be swept away. In this rhetoric we might see whole cages of squashed birds swept aside with the West, not only economic and political but also the flattening of feminism, gay rights and general human freedoms. A fairly recent example might be the debate that took place in the Ugandan parliament in February 2023 as the legislature contemplated a further toughening of the anti-gay law — where the most radical proponents demanded the death penalty, or at least life imprisonment, for those caught in the act. Anita Among, speaker of the parliament, stated: “You are either with us, or you’re with the Western world.” We live in an era of unholy alliances, collaborations and conjunctions of ideological forces which disrupt the standard binary of Left and Right. Feminist, gay and trans struggles are denounced as an instrument of Western ideological colonialism used to undermine African identity. If this type of thinking continues to be allowed to define the debate, the possibility of being a gay Ugandan, a feminist Ugandan, a trans Ugandan can be redefined out of existence; another casualty of a narrow definition of “progress”.
The miserable reality is that the promise of decolonisation can be co-opted as a screen for other processes, its liberatory potential caught in the vice-like grip of a too-rigid definition of what moving forward means. The people of numerous African countries, from Angola to Zimbabwe, exist under more or less corrupt social systems in which the gap between the “masters” and the poor majority — the gap in wealth, in power, in privileges and freedom — is arguably even wider than under colonial rule. “Decolonisation” in these circumstances can function almost as a metaphor for the emergence of new class-based hierarchies. While there are, of course, a myriad of arguments that one can advance against any suggestion that things were “better” under colonial rule, if we fail to recognise the potential for decolonial movements to be absorbed into problematic regimes, the new Right will do it for us (as they are already doing in the case of South Africa, bloviating about the inability of black people to run the country “properly”). Mao said: “Revolution is not a dinner party.” But what if the reality after the revolution is even less of a dinner party? This in no way implies that we should abandon progress — we should rather redefine it, and the first step towards doing so is to be able to acknowledge uncomfortable realities, even those which appear squalid and mangled, and especially those we find shameful and grievous. We need less squashed birds hidden in trunks while we applaud the false living bird distracting us from capitalist corruption and authoritarian power.
The two articles Marx wrote on India in 1893 (“The British Rule in India” and “The Future Results of British Rule in India”), usually dismissed by postcolonial scholars as embarrassing cases of Marx’s “Eurocentrism”, are today more interesting than ever. Marx outlines, without restraint, the “profound hypocrisy and inherent barbarism” of the British colonisation of India, right up to the systematic use of torture prohibited in the West but “outsourced” to Indians (really there is nothing new under the sun — these were the Guantanamos of 19th-century British India). All he adds is: “can mankind fulfil its destiny without a fundamental revolution in the social state of Asia? If not, whatever may have been the crimes of England she was the unconscious tool of history in bringing about that revolution.”
Despite the mention of “destiny”, one should not wholly dismiss the notion of the “unconscious tool of history” as naive teleology, an ends-justify-the-means fatalistic “trust into the Cunning of Reason which makes even the vilest crimes instruments of progress”. The point Marx is making is simply that the British colonisation of India created conditions for the double liberation of India: from the constraints of its own tradition as well as from colonisation itself. Today, of course, such a standpoint appears all too naive — now we know how the British colonisers destroyed local industries in India and provoked havoc with tens of millions dead. Of course, we would never say that the horrors of colonisation were worth the price of progressing towards some nebulous utopian future. A much more modest stance should be adopted: Great Britain’s actions in India were inexcusable and the direct outcome a devastating catastrophe; however, once this catastrophe happened it opened up a new path for India. That “however” is an uncomfortable adverb to dwell in, but it remains open to hope as neater historical narratives do not.
When Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer delineate the contours of the emerging late-capitalist “administered world” (verwaltete Welt), they are presenting it as coinciding with barbarism, as the point at which civilisation itself returns to barbarism. A kind of negative telos of the whole progress of Enlightenment, as the Nietzschean kingdom of the Last Men: “One has one’s little pleasure for the day and one’s little pleasure for the night: but one has a regard for health. ‘We have invented happiness,’ say the last men, and they blink.” At the same time, Adorno and Horkheimer nevertheless warn against the more direct catastrophes (different forms of terror, etc.). The liberal-democratic society of Last Men is thus unimaginably awful, the only problem being that all other societies are worse, so that the choice appears as one between bad and worse (or a rock and a hard place). The ambiguity here is irreducible: on the one hand, the “administered world” is the final catastrophic outcome of the Enlightenment; on the other hand, the “normal” societal path is continually threatened by catastrophes, from war and terror to ecological disasters. We are required to battle these catastrophes while simultaneously bearing in mind that the ultimate catastrophe is the apparently “normal” structures and rhythms of the “administered world”. In other words, we are walking a kind of Moebius path: if we progress far enough on one side, we reach our starting point again. Does the same not hold for progressivism in general? After centuries in which visionaries of all stripes dreamed of what humanity might achieve together. The only indubitable “progressive” goal that humanity can pursue today, in view of ecological and other threats, is to simply survive.
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“Our starting point should be that there is no such thing as progress in general. But true progress must aim at retroactively redeeming all the squashed birds of the past progresses — not redeeming them in reality, but redeeming the potentiality that was present in them.”
Too many people thinking this is clever and a useful exercise. It isn’t.
I can agree with the author on one point – perhaps his main point. If we’re to continue to use the term “progress” it needs to be redefined. One could argue that if we’re to continue at all, it needs to be.
I’m going to go full in here, and offer a redefinition, as: escape from illusion.
What the author describes in this essay is the sense of disillusion with the apparent outcomes for our societies – including awareness now of all societies: East, West, North and South – of the ways in which “progress” has hitherto become manifest.
It’s my contention that the obvious outcome of illusions will be disillusion, and it’s precisely this which defines our current malaise.
So what do i mean by “illusions”?
All the -isms, for a start, and the author outlines the most pertinent example of Marxism, whose after-effects we’re currently subject to following “the march through the institutions”.
Next: religion itself. Yes, all religions. They’re all vessels for the creation of illusions, to provide whichever form of ‘comfort’ or authoritarianism they espouse, with (or even without) the invocation of a deity to underpin them. Once the ‘underpinning’ is removed, they’re lost and the loss of religion then brings about a sense of disillusionment.
Where does that leave us? Humans are social beings and since the dawn of consciousness, we’ve gathered together and created the social realm, with ever-increasing degrees of sophistication. This complexity is now available to all via the internet.
What we’re witnessing then is the full extent of our humanity – all aspects of it – reflected back to ourselves for the first time in history, and so my redefinition of what might constitute “progress” is to understand ourselves more fully – our grasping for illusions – and to finally divest ourselves of the need for them. It’s the realisation of all our failed illusions that we’re now faced with, and the struggle to overcome them is reflected in this article.
my redefinition of what might constitute “progress” is to understand ourselves more fully – our grasping for illusions – and to finally divest ourselves of the need for them.
That does sound a bit like Marxism, a sort of materialistic existence. It sounds like an end to being human and an opening for AI that exists without illusions.
It’s the antithesis of materialism – yet another -ism that we’d do well to divest ourselves of. I’m speaking of the innate wonder of being alive and conscious of ourselves – untrammelled by attempts to interpret any greater meaning or process, whilst being fully engsged with the world.
Of course, power structures within a complex organised society will endure but those which claim validity via a god or any other type of creed are inherently pernicious. It’s up to us how we recreate our social structures without them: we’ve not been here before in recorded history.
AI will only gain ascendency over us if we fail to understand ourselves and allow it to do so. It’s a real threat, i agree.
whilst being fully engsged with the world.
As what? You mean just as animals are?
There are very few animals who exhibit awareness of being ‘conscious’ of themselves (dolphins, ravens being examples) and certainly not in the way that the human brain has developed consciousness, extending to awareness of events in the universe occurring billions of years ago.
It’s precisely that sense of wonder i refer to: and that’s where any potential future might develop, divested of creeds and dogmas.
That’s where I find a problem. As soon as you’re conscious of anything then you’re no longer fully engaged because the world is then viewed subjectively. But, each to his/her own.
In the wise words of Thomas Sowell “There are no solutions, there are only trade-offs”.
Well said. Progress is in the eye of the beholder.
Going backwards to make things right is too often simply getting even (often for the sins of someone’s long dead ancestor). Ideologies over the centuries seem to me to have caused more harm than good–and are based on an over-blown sense in humans, particularly leaders and intellectuals, that they see the curve of time and can understand where its going. We simply don’t know.
Nope, a system that helps us make those trade-offs in the most palatable manner seems the best we can hope for, at least in this stage of human evolution. Now whether the liberal republic is the best way to do so (I think it is) or not would be a more interesting conversation.
My view is simpler. Progress is measured in material terms, which involve strict economic and technological metrics that can be enumerated.
There are no other kinds of progress, and the only people who say there are, are the chancers that infest political establishments and claim that their own presence is essential to the rest of us. In fact, they are merely parasites.
Lord bless us …I’m just a simple soul ( tho I did learn to read in Covid & gosh it’s been v useful ) I kno UnHerd prides itself upon its rather more lofty complex & nuanced articles compared to more plebeian scribblings but this is just a pompous Self-satisfied yawn -inducing load of old tosh !!!!! And when someone is described as a self-confessed communist it just makes me want to weep
Yeeeeooowch! This author began so well, but quickly veered into ‘big word’ territory (and long paragraphs).
The basic point regarding ‘squashed birds of progress’ is fine and well put (though I quibble with his ideas that a Western society unmoored from religious social morals is better than ancient African societies that are more unashamedly Christian than the “enlightened” West), but it is buried under speech, much speech that hides his words.
Never use two words where one will do (in my humble view); I see he takes the opposite tack. Less is more.
“The squashed dead bird here is politics itself.” There are two fundamental ways of thinking about politics….a limited conception and a grandiose one. The limited one is about negotiating disagreements and conflicts of interest among the citizenry. The grandiose one is the utopian idea of bringing about ‘Progress’ by political means. Due to the dominance of this latter conception in the modern era, we in the West have been schooled into an expectation that there is a political solution to every social problem. There isn’t… but the expectation can lead people – especially the most politically engaged kind – down some big rabbit holes.
One of them is a fixation on Something to Blame for our discontents. On the Progressive Left it has propelled endless – mostly counter-productive – social engineering. And now – in our early 21st c. – its oppressor/victim psychosis has run riot giving us the Woke madness we currently endure. Meanwhile on the Right-hand side of the online political ecosystem this Who Can I Blame mentality often leads people to see Wokeness as having been deliberately imposed on us normal everyday citizenry by some-or-other kind of ‘elite’ (Techno bros, Cultural Marxists, Managerial Elites etc). These ‘elites’ – so the argument runs – are ‘in control’ and must be defeated in order to bring an end to the madness. But this is to seriously misread the nature our 21st c. Western malaise; the most salient feature of which is that it has become out of control by anyone. Rather it is a kind of mass psychosis that ensnares everyone – rich and poor (especially the rich if anything), young and old, albeit in varying intensities. https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/the-madness-of-intelligentsias
Thank you Slavoj Žižek. As always you write to encourage philosophic work, the act of thinking. I have ordered your book “Against Progress”. We need to think more about progress.
Circular waffle utterly detached from practicality!
This is an interesting essay. It suggests to me that we think we’re in a good place because we’re here and the nature of progress and it’s proof is that we are here now. That everything that’s happened, good and bad, led to this moment in time. That we should accept the past because it got us here, as suggested by the statement “whatever may have been the crimes of England she was the unconscious tool of history in bringing about that revolution.” As a Darwinist I would go along with this. The problem is inserting the word progress, which is generally understood as an improved or more advanced state and is also qualified by ideas of freedom, as if we’re moving towards freedom, towards greater degrees of real freedom, when in fact it’s about survival, whether we make it to the present and the future or not.
Slavoj Žižek seems to suggest that the squashed birds, “the politics as a domain in which conflict can be productively articulated and addressed, a domain in which citizens can be transformed by their participation,” is buried under the drive of progress and needs to be redeemed, or their potential redeemed. Presumably that means and includes all of the past having a place at the table, whatever part they may have played. Assuming i’ve read the essay correctly that’s difficult for me to contemplate because if it wasn’t a “good fit” for the it’s time then it has no place in the present. But we don’t seem to live like that anymore, because survival is guaranteed by the state, which distorts everything.
So tens of millions of dead laid at the door of the British, without anything other than the vaguest of reasons. Though he did mention gulags, I presume this enormous death toll was from the partition?
Despite all our current problems I would rather be living now, in a Western plauralist democracy, than under any other political system, or at any other time in human history