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All this brings to
mind the adage of the contemporary quantum physicist Carlo Rovelli, who
said that being is a “momentary get together on the sand,” briefly
coming together and then disaggregating, coming together again in
another configuration, and so on.
Quantum Daoism
Žižek’s insight corresponds as well to another thinker we’ve published in
Noema, the Daoist scholar Dingxin Zhao. He offers a dialectical frame
for understanding how history unfolds that is deeper than Hegel’s
Western conception precisely because it disavows any set destiny.
Zhao recounts the
Daoist perspective that history does not progress toward some
teleological terminus that can “lay claim to universal or eternal truths
… because the significance and function of any causal forces invariably
change with different contexts.” The elusive Way unfolding across
contingent time “not only rejects the imposition of a direction onto
history but also negates the existence of any specific, law-like forces
underpinning the apparent cyclic patterns of historical events.”
As Laozi wrote in the
Tao Te Ching “the Dao that can be stated cannot be the universal (or
eternal) Dao” because the concrete circumstances of existence are always
in flux. It is all about the conjunction of relations revealed at a
moment in time and a place in space.
This understanding of
the indeterminate direction of history not only departs from the modern
paradigm of historical progression rooted in Judeo-Christian
eschatology, or theology of destiny, but embraces its opposite in the
“principle of reverse movement.” History can go forward, backward or
sideways.
Just as every
phenomenon contains its opposite, so too, by this principle, every
achievement of power carries the seeds of its own undoing within.
“In the Daoist
principle of reverse movement, as one actor in military or economic
competition progressively secures the upper hand, opposing actors would
also gather momentum,” Zhao writes. “For instance, the dominant actor
becomes increasingly susceptible to various errors — over-expansion,
underestimating adversaries, disregarding internal vulnerabilities and
potential crises. Meanwhile, weaker actors respond to their more
formidable opponent by intensifying their desire to change, including
learning from their opponent and striving for ‘self-strengthening’.”
The principle of
reverse movement also “cautions us against the hubris of making linear
predictions about upward-trending social tides and urges us to embrace
the intricacies of complexity and acknowledge the multifaceted interplay
of diverse forces. By doing so, we are compelled to appreciate the
heterogeneous nature of historical change.”
History Won’t End At Soft Fascism
Barring a shift in
the present correlation of forces, Žižek sees soft fascism gaining
traction in the near term over the remnants of the Enlightenment dream.
Now that America has gone rogue with its turn to Trumpism, “Europe is
our last hope,” as he puts it. At least, for now, it is striving to get
beyond the haunting tribal passions of its past through norms and
transnational institutions governed by law and the rule of reason.
There is no telling
where the future will go. But it won’t end at soft fascism, which, per
the principle of the reverse movement of history, is, by its very
ascendance, laying the ground for its own ruination. Perhaps the radical
splintering it fosters, just when the planetary imperative of coming
together to face climate change is most pressing, will, of necessity,
propel the next movement of history decisively in the opposite
direction?
We will only know
what the future holds when contingent circumstances, including the
self-strengthening of opposing forces and the weakening of dominant
ones, converge as time goes on to create an entirely new historical
moment, different from anything that came before. |