Happily in the market

The highest guru of left-liberal historians, also known as the last Marxist with functioning brain cells, Eric Hobsbawm, is predictably pe...

The highest guru of left-liberal historians, also known as the last Marxist with functioning brain cells, Eric Hobsbawm, is predictably pessimistic in his millennial forecast: 8220;Our world risks both explosion and implosion. It must change. We do not know where we are going. We only know that history has brought us to this point8230; If humanity is to have a recognisable future, it cannot be by prolonging the past or the present. If we try to build the third millennium on that basis, we shall fail. And the price of failure, that is to say, the alternative to a cha-nged society, is darkness.8221;

Less than apocalyptic, but a cautionary finger pointed towards every man who is suffering from the millennium hangover. But is he likely to suspend the celebration, see in the dawn of the twenty-first century the dark remains of the last one hundred years? Unlikely, for the man who has survived what Hobsbawm calls the age of extremes is the privileged child of history. He, at this moment of that simulated millennialcatharsis, stands rather triumphantly in the province of dead prophecies. What he sees in the detritus of the twentieth century is the carbonised wreckage of prophets8217; falsities, alternatives of the chosen ones. Yes, history has brought us to this point, this point of knowledge and memory, of awareness and anxiety, but this point is steeped in realism.

Really, realism is something worth celebrating in this new millennium which owes it fatherhood to the Cross. The Christian Kingdom, built on martyrdom, is the most visible civilisational legacy of our times. The New Man, the evolved man, was the motive behind the Christian Kingdom, we know that. The extreme gestures of history were the civilisational translations of the New Man project. The twentieth century witnessed its darkest implementations. In wars and revolutions, in nationalist rage and tribal hate, we read rewritten texts of salvation. Man updated God8217;s scriptures as ideology, and he did it for the sake of every man. Wasn8217;t communism the mostambitious rejoinder to the philosophy of Christ? Both Christ and the commissar were agents of happiness.

The commissar was a pretender, co-mmunism was cross without compassion. In a century of the messianic, communism sought to challenge the ideo- logy of salvation only to emerge itself as a false theology. After all, the reason of the revolution was a kingdom of justice on earth. Revolution was an upsu-rge meant for happiness. Cried out the manifesto of the revolutionary:

8220;The Communists disdain to conceal their views and ai-ms. They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions. Let the ruling classes tremble at a communist revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. Working men of all countries, unite8221;. In retrospect, the New Man of freedom was chained to the slogan. He was an insignificant part of the masses. He was set against the other man, the lesser man, the enemy, without whom norevolution, no matter whether the author was communist or nationalist, was complete.

From Stalin to Hitler to Mao to Kh-omeini, the project of happiness could not have succeeded without the Enemy. Octavio Paz, who died as a disillusioned man of the revolutionary ideal, wrote: 8220;Tyrannies and despotisms need the threat of an outside enemy to justify th-eir rule. When such an enemy does not exist, they invent one. The enemy is the devil. Not just any devil, but a figure, half real and half mythical, in which the enemy without and the enemy within are conjoined. The identification of the domestic enemy with the foreign power possesses, at one and the same time, a practical as well as a symbolic value.

The devil is no longer within us but outside the social body: it is alien, and we must all rally ro-und the revolutionary chief to defend ourse-lves.8221; The enemy was burned, banned and ba-nished. The chilly remo-teness of Siberia, the finality of Auschwitz, the fury of the Cultural Revolution, the closedwindows of the Great Isla-mic Revolution acirc;euro;ldquo; in the vastness of the Kingdom of Justice, justice was always pitted against the question of the enemy. 8220;The lamps are going out all over Europe8221;, said a British foreign secretary in the momentous 1914. The lamps of we-stern civilisation, of renaissance and enlightenment, and the lanterns of oriental wisdom, were periodical victims of the twentieth century in which the defining motif was the Alternative. A better world, painted on an overstretched canvas of the fantasy artist. The fin of the twentieth siecle was also the end of the art of alternatives.

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Today, the false religion of communism is in the category of the occult. For, a few non-believing amateurs could auth-or the script of living in truth8217; after ei-ghty years of the biggest lie. At last a mo-ral rejoinder to the pretence of ideology was possible. The year 1989 was the year of the question, of dissent. A playwright or an electrician could change the dest-iny of a nation, politics could survive outsidethe rhetoric of the professional po-litician. Anti-political politics, polities fr- om the below, as Vaclav Havel would ca-ll the liberating dissent of the late Eighties. Actually, the end of the twentieth ce-ntury saw the end of many pretences. The ideology was a sham. The religion that tried to be as ambitious as Christianity was the product of a false theology. Even the nationalist who defined identity in terms of ethnic superiority couldn8217;t, despite the graveyards, totally deform the nation. The last triumph of the twentieth century was more than the triumph of western liberal capitalism.It was the triumph of the persevera-nce of man, his long wait for justice.

It was not the end of history, it was an awesome intervention by history in the affa-irs of the ideologically manipulated man. The man who has survived the century of false gods is free enough to choose his adjectives of freedom. He is a the child of a marketplace defined by wealth and de-mocracy. The new clashes that are waiting to happen in hisworld are not exactly civilisational. No, they are not post-history clashes of incompatible civilisations, despite Bosnia, despite Kandahar. Freedom and choices are so overwhelming that he cannot be hijacked by any one-dimensional theology. What we see today is the happiness of pursuit in a world where the alternatives are written not by the Supreme Leader but by the people.

During the euphoria of 8217;89, Czeslaw Milosz wrote: 8220;what remains today is the idea of responsibility, which works aga-inst the loneliness and indifference of an individual living in the belly of a whale8221;. Let freedom be compatible with respo-nsibility in the age of prophets outcast.