<nettime> A Necessary New Alternative Progressive-Pragmatist US Renaissance for Network Alignment 2024

[Max Herman via nettime-l <nettime-l@lists.nettime.org>]

+++

When a society or country has been around for a long time, same as with a person, problems and issues tend to pile up.

No matter how nobly a group starts off, if it attempts anything more difficult than playing tic-tac-toe to a draw it will have failures.  Its populace and leaders will have done bad things as well as good and will have had both good and bad luck, neighbors, ideas, and weather.

However, since the bad stuff sticks in everyone's craw and the good stuff -- being just the normal heroics of daily life mostly -- gets forgotten or taken for granted, people tire of the society and its ways.  Its ideals and laws look tired and weak.  The grass starts to look greener.  The giant problems, the kind that require unified and committed effort and therefore get kicked down the road when unity is feeble and time plentiful, loom as impossible to ever solve.  Fear and panic might even creep in, or despair, or the obvious mammal reflex to hate.

It is during such times, think of them as "middle" phases where difficulty has gotten serious, that the dynamic of renascence begins to apply.  What needs bringing back are the ideals with which the society started, since reality has dulled and dimmed their original glow, and the reason they need reviving is not only that they have ebbed but that urgent problems are not getting solved.  Only a rather bad situation can ever justify a renascence, because when all is well and good you coast.

Therefore every renaissance is accompanied by stress and danger, tension and conflict, risk and uncertainty.  After all, renaissance isn't the only option.  Some will call during major crises for going back in time, returning to a past they believe was better and safer, simpler and crisis-free.  (This is really just fear settling in like numbness to the immobilized limbs of the body politic as it were, since even if you went back to say 1953 you'd have to pretty soon deal with 1954, then 1955, and would eventually find yourself right back where you were.)  Call this "wishful regress" or the "rewind faction," and it's primarily nostalgic not necessarily or even usually conservative.

The third major option, after going forward and going backward, is the opportunism of the demagogue.

The demagogue historically is an opportunist with the gift of gab who takes over an ailing political party.  This person is also an imaginary figure, like turning back the clock is imaginary, but they can claim to be bringing a bright and perfect future in return for the gift of power.  The society itself, its governing and cultural institutions, and its frameworks or fabric so to speak become the enemy of society in a clever and adept sleight of hand.  All the demagogue asks for is to end the rule of law (replacing it with rule by them), erase checks and balances, and abolish accountability (including quaint ideas like telling the truth, a free press, independent judiciary, common decency, and the like) so that their true and pure salvific power can truly radiate.  Sweep away everything that might impede me, promises the demagogue, and all your dreams shall come true.  (In reality, such figures rarely offer anything but belligerent kleptocracy fueled by ethical surrealism and broadcast hypno-aesthetics.)

In the twentieth century, almost exactly one hundred years ago, the demagogue was Mussolini.  He promised a perfect future in exchange for all power.  The result was tragedy.

What can prevent the same mistake today?

Renaissance or renascence, like starting over on better principles while still being you, is not easy at all; and opportunities for such new starts are often overlooked, ignored, or just plain botched for lack of skill and effort.  But such renewal or reinvention is the only practical alternative to the demagogue, who if not stopped by a society's fabric reconstituted always crashes the whole thing.  This is because the demagogue's promises are lies, like hollow bricks sold as solid ones, which inevitably crumble if built upon like the ancient Greek hybris of tragic tyrannoi.  If they were truthful promises, the demagogue would be everyone's perfect solution.  But they are not truthful, and the demagogue merely presides over disastrous collapse accompanied by loud speeches and marching bands.

+

How can the United States, formed in approximately 1788 along Enlightenment principles, achieve renascence?

Well first of all, we have to realize that the Enlightenment was itself a renascence of a prior renaissance, namely the Italian, having moved by isomorphism out of that hilly land of zest and antiquity into the Anglo and French and Spanish and Flemish and German and other lands near and far, and translated by that motion from what you might call the personal scale to the communal.  How to found society, it was asked, specifically laws and institutions, on the basis of Reason and Experience (including science and art as equal peers) rather than Authority and Tradition alone (i.e. religious monarchy), and by so doing avert the endless sectarian chaos and bloodshed of the old world, l'ancien régime?  In a nutshell they tried to look at everything that had been done before (the past), sort out the acorns from the squirrel turds, then apply creative innovation to pragmatically address then-present problems.  This is adaptation at work in every sense including the evolutionary.

The demagogue on the other hand will tell you there is nothing but turds in the societal basket, and that only their unique spirit can lead you to the golden horn of plenty brimming with plump hazelnuts.  But they are just selling you a bill of goods, and have no path but the road to ruin, though they will accept your money gladly along the way.  To declare Enlightenment ideas like voting and free expression to be passé, false master narratives long abandoned to the dustbin of history, might feel cathartic but it only helps the demagogue.  Enlightenment, like modernity itself especially in any sustainable form, is ongoing, not post- or past despite having become an ordinary and routine expectation.  (Are we really post-voting, and post-caring about voting?  Only in an arbitrarily dramatic and hypocritical sense, which frankly breeds only despair and imaginative apathy by exaggerating in pursuit of shock value.)  This does not mean, however, that preserving a constitutional republic is easy, a forever fait accompli which never needs any upkeep.

To revive the ideals that make the USA worth preserving and for which its preservation is necessary means to refresh and rededicate ourselves to principles like human rights, the rule of law, voting rights, and freedom of expression, adding genuine contemporary innovation and creativity in holistic cultural, biological, technological, environmental, temporal, and spatial contexts, then apply the entire process network to the two toughest problems of the century: climate and poverty.  If renascent constitutional democracy does not take on these tasks then the demagogue will.  It's unfortunate but true.  There is no benevolent referee or omniscient grownup ready to swoop down from their house on the hill and fix it all for us.

Furthermore, what is probably this and every century's heaviest burden and most essential task -- discovering a means to persuade all major parties to choose peace over war as Tolstoy admonished -- is necessary for renascent results.  So be it.  This means accepting hybrid design for many systems, in several of which the twentieth century unreasonably sought purity, while adhering to the very ideals we hope to help regenerate.  Fiercely-held opinions will sometimes need to abate or adapt in the interest of cooperative progress.

For additional detail, even the ever-loving Rand corporation wrote a report some time ago about the possible main global scenarios for 2040.  The ideal best-case one was called "a renaissance of the democracies," which might be something like what we are talking about here.  The likelihood is maybe 10% or less, but that math can be changed if good choices are made by sufficiently many.  The key point is plural: all the democracies.  "America Before Everybody Else," or (ABEE), cannot renew democracy or the USA.  The approach must be "All Nations Evolving Together," as much as practically possible, if it is to avoid devolving into might-makes-right.  Teamwork is unavoidable.  Mere might makes right along the lines of Machiavelli is the demagogue path which undermines any renaissance scenario.  That's not to say the Machiavellian future isn't the odds-on favorite:  like entropy, it always is.

+

To renew the renascence of renaissance therefore we have to go back to the source, which was even the Italian Renaissance's own source, "ai rivi di vostr'arti" and of the river of all your arts, "esperienza," if you would but try it, experience and experiment, methodical science and imaginative art: the modern double-helical pillar which hopes to prop up from collapse the two-legged stool of church and state.  Dante wrote of this word "esperienza" with "extraordinary overtones," but it took Leonardo, whose wings were actually made for such a flight, to paint its portrait.  He couldn't safely name it outright but knew how to leave enough pointers that we could, just barely in time, find his map, how-to-guide, blueprint, score, dictionary, song, stage direction, laboratory procedure, and playbook for sustainable modernity.  Nor are indigeneity and the earth's "vegetative soul" or living being excluded from this source; and as Pater wrote in the essay which for Yeats contained the "first modern poem" (about the smiling portrait) and from which Proust, Joyce, Eliot, Stevens, Wilde, and more all found common grist, “The movement of the fifteenth century was twofold; partly the Renaissance, partly also the coming of what is called the 'modern spirit,' with its realism, its appeal to experience. It comprehended a return to antiquity, and a return to nature. Raphael represents the return to antiquity, and Leonardo the return to nature.”

We need both, the voice and the face, as Leonardo knew, both word and image, to mirror us back to ourselves better than Machiavelli's mirror for demagogues teaching slaughter and destruction.  The better mirror, it is true, will prevail in shaping the formless potential futures that reside within those living today.  It is up to us whether we succeed or fail and we cannot blame the universe's cold heart.

One such phrase as applicable to the USA, as if to jeer at us from the balconies that line history's alleyway perfectly for dumping chamberpots and hurling rotten vegetables, has been previously adopted by indeed the worst of contemporary bigots and thus appears tainted beyond any possible reclamation.  (It also applies to a period of architecture that includes the Brooklyn Bridge and Coit Tower with its Rivera murals.)  The name-phrase in literature belongs to those 19th century innovators Ralph and Nathaniel, Emily and Walt, plus old sport Henry, a group more recently expanded to include Frederick himself.  But does it belong only to them?  Maybe it does.

You might call it, if you felt the need, "democracy renascent," or "DR," a Hippocratic self-health program in which all persons participate and somehow coalesce enough to get past Scylla and Charybdis, Calvino's petrifying face of the twin political abyss formed by right and left refusing to parley.  You might call it a new birth of freedom, for example.  Or, you could say not American but something having larger square footage like "World Renaissance."  ("Human Renaissance" would certain put everyone's best skills to work on the problem.)  At the end of the day, a "Global Year of Renaissance Experiment" might be a reasonable option.

It strikes me now though that the most proper name could well be Democratic Renaissance (i.e. the Renaissance of the Democracies).  Because if the US goes demagogue, like it or not, so does everyone else.

Or, as Hamilton ended the Federalist 85, in the last paper's last paragraph, quoting Hume who got many ideas from Bacon's 1620 book of modern knowledge ("our only hope is in the regeneration of the sciences, by regularly raising them on the foundation of experience and building them anew"), which had drawn perhaps in turn upon Cervantes' Don Quixote ("experience itself, the mother of all the sciences"), a work animated noticeably by Montaigne's final essay "Of Experience" from the country of Amboise where Leonardo left his remains (une allégorie de l'expérience) and perhaps even his copy of Dante's Paradiso I&II and the other Bacon's 1267 Opus Majus including said opus' book the sixth "De scientia experimentalis," having started the Federalist's first paper with the four fine words "After an unequivocal experience....":

'The zeal for attempts to amend, prior to the establishment of the Constitution, must abate in every [person] who is ready to accede to the truth of the following observations of a writer equally solid and ingenious: "To balance a large state or society" says hee, "whether monarchical or republican, on general laws, is a work of so great difficulty, that no human genius, however comprehensive, is able, by the mere dint of reason and reflection, to effect it. The judgments of many must unite in the work; EXPERIENCE must guide their labor; TIME must bring it to perfection, and the FEELING of inconveniences must correct the mistakes which they inevitably fall into in their first trials and experiments." These judicious reflections contain a lesson of moderation to all the sincere lovers of the Union, and ought to put them upon their guard against hazarding anarchy, civil war, a perpetual alienation of the States from each other, and perhaps the military despotism of a victorious demagogue, in the pursuit of what they are not likely to obtain, but from TIME and EXPERIENCE. It may be in me a defect of political fortitude, but I acknowledge that I cannot entertain an equal tranquillity with those who affect to treat the dangers of a longer continuance in our present situation as imaginary. A NATION, without a NATIONAL GOVERNMENT, is, in my view, an awful spectacle. The establishment of a Constitution, in time of profound peace, by the voluntary consent of a whole people, is a PRODIGY, to the completion of which I look forward with trembling anxiety. I can reconcile it to no rules of prudence to let go the hold we now have, in so arduous an enterprise, upon seven out of the thirteen States, and after having passed over so considerable a part of the ground, to recommence the course. I dread the more the consequences of new attempts, because I KNOW that POWERFUL INDIVIDUALS, in this and in other States, are enemies to a general national government in every possible shape.'  [All caps from the original 1st ed.]

https://experiencedemocracy2024.org/experience-democracy-is/

+++








-- 
# distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission
# <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
# collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
# more info: https://www.nettime.org
# contact: nettime-l-owner@lists.nettime.org