by Christopher Horner
In daily life we get along okay without what we call thinking. Indeed, most of the time we do our daily round without anything coming to our conscious mind – muscle memory and routines get us through the morning rituals of washing and making coffee. And when we do need to bring something to mind, to think about it, it’s often not felt to cause a lot of friction: where did I put my glasses? When does the train leave? and so on.
So, we get on well in the world of medium sized dry goods, where things can be dropped on your foot and the train leaves at 7.00 AM. Common sense carries us a long way here. For common sense is what we know already, what we can assume and the things we know how to do because we know what they are.
There are limits, though. We begin to run into difficulties when we apply the categories of the understanding – the normal way we think of things – into areas which look as if they are same kind of thing, but are not. I’m thinking of anything to do with long term change, of the way in which structures underlie what we see, of the complex interactions of the economy and politics. The kind of thinking that we might call common sense is the ‘spontaneous ideology of everyday life’, and it has problems with the larger and longer-range things that both run through our lives and have a history that we should try to grasp.
If we fail to make that effort, we typically find ourselves falling back on the notion that these are just things that we can assume to be the case. This can lead to quite problematic positions. So, a friend of mine – intelligent, well educated – announced to me, apropos of Trump et al ‘half of America is just sick’. Perhaps on reflection he’d think that a bit inadequate, but it does represent the baffled contempt many have for the people who support a party and a politician who they see, rightly, as a threat to whatever democracy remains in the USA. The same language gets used about Brexit supporters in the UK, about the gilets jaunes in France and more. And it doesn’t just apply to the bêtes noires of liberal mindset: thinking about the economy in terms of the household budget, (the government is running out of money! Etc), Russia and Ukraine, Israel Palestine, all get bedevilled by a kind of frozen thinking.
Why frozen? Because it thinks in terms of blocks, of things, and it tends to banish temporality – how something came to be what it is and what it may become – as well as the way things are caught up by and interact with other entities and forces. It is rigid.
We find it anywhere. It certainly isn’t the product of thoughtlessness or ignorance. A random example is way some historians approach their subject. This is nicely conveyed in James Holstun’s discussion of revisionism in the history of the English Revolution of the 1640s [1]. In the last few decades there has been an attempt to explain the strife in that period in terms of what Holstun calls ‘Primal Contingencies’. An example is the ‘personality of Charles 1st.’ it is treated as a fact of the matter which answers the question Why the civil War? With the answer ‘because Charles was a scheming and untrustworthy king’. Why? gets the answer just because. This gives it the status of an uncaused cause, monad, a simple fact of the matter that explains what happened. It also suggests that things might have played out quite differently if, say, Charles’ elder brother had ascended to the throne rather than dying young. This might seem an good way to write history, since, after all, contingency plays a big part in human affairs The problem with this is that it leaves out longer expanse of time, social and historic factors, some economic, some not, that interact and make the period far less like a stream of events, one after the other, that might have been replaced by another random set . The truth, surely, is that if that if Charles hadn’t been king, England would still have been in for very serious disturbances in the 17th century. There was a logic to events in the period not reducible to Personality or ‘Religion’ (another primal contingency much favoured by some historians), or any other frozen fact.
So, what’s the problem here? I don’t think it is with contingency as such. The option here isn’t between ‘stuff just happens’ and some kind of iron track of historical necessity. It is rather the elevation of a fact, or event, or situation and treating it in isolation. This is the approach much favoured by a certain positivism in, especially, anglophone culture (‘those are the facts’) and an empiricism that favours a kind of vulgar nominalism that declares there are just things ‘out there’, that make other things happen.
The answer to this kind of thing isn’t, of course, to demands an endless series of causes going back to the start of the universe, but rather a willingness to take in a kind of approach that emphasises the way in which temporality is present in the thing discussed. This mustn’t descend into mere ‘Chronism’ (as Holstun calls it), in which one damn thing appears, to be replaced by another ad infinitum. Rather, one tries to grasp the historical nature of the phenomenon: what has shaped it? What continues to push it, to transform it?
Next, a sense of the mediated nature of things: the complex interplay of economic, social, political etc forces that act in such a way as to deny an indivisible wholeness to the thing under consideration: everything is self-divided (included us). This is another way of stating the importance of contradiction in social phenomena, since division, negation and transformation are so important here. This would be a move towards a dialectical way of thinking the matter, the employment of Reason beyond ‘common sense’.
It would be good, too, if in ditching the ‘facts are just out there’ positivism, we dumped vulgar nominalism too. There are plenty of things that one cannot drop on one’s foot or touch that have real effects in our world. I’ll name one: Capital – capitalism. It’s a thing you can’t prod with your finger, but it certainly exists.
This might be the start of a more adequate grasp of the Israel/Palestine question, or Brexit, or Ukraine/Russia. But I started with Trump and the US political scene so I will finish with it. Applying the considerations I’ve just mentioned we might think more fruitfully about how the USA got into a situation in which Trump could appear attractive to a large part of the population. If the causes of Trump are deeper and more complex than the Good versus Evil of a morality play, his disappearance would not set everything right again. To what extent is the entire political establishment – both main parties and their backers – responsible for the current situation? further: could an economic system based on the dogmas of neoliberalism be part of the problem? Rust belts, spiralling inequality and the desperation of living pay-check to pay-check came from somewhere, and have certain consequences for the way political choices are understood.
Perhaps the answers, whatever they are, will be found to go beyond ‘half the American people have gone mad’.
[1] ‘Historical Revisionism and the Perils of Chronism’, in Ehud’s Dagger: Class Struggle in the English Revolution, James Holstun, Verso books, 2002.
Photograph by the author.