[This is from the old Slant Truth. It was originally posted on 22 September, 2006]

This is part of what I read this morning and I thought I’d share. Just some ideas to think about.

From an essay by Terry Eagleton on Georg Luk�cs¹

Changing the world involved a curious kind of doublethink. For us to act effectively, the mind must buckle itself austerely to the actual, in the belief that knowing the situation for what it is is the source of all moral and political wisdom. The only trouble is that such knowledge is also desperately hard to come by, and perhaps in any complete sense unattainable. What is difficult is not so much solutions, but grasping the way it is with a particular bit of the world. If you get this right, it will intimate the kind of solutions you should look to. Answers are not the hardest thing.

The problem is not that there are many competing versions of how it is with the world, including the postmodern belief that it is no way in particular; it is also that to bow our minds submissively to the actual requires a humility and self-effacement which the clamorous ego finds hard to stomach. It is an unglamorous business, distasteful to the fantasising, chronically self-deceiving human mind. Seeing things for what they are is in the end possible only for the virtuous.

There is no point in demanding an end to capitalism if the system was wound up several decades ago and one has simply failed to notice. In this broad sense, all prescriptions about what to do imply descriptions of what is the case. Values must be in some sense linked to facts. But at the very moment the mind is required to be chaste, rigorous and self-forgetful, it is also asked to spurn the actual in the name of the possible.

It must combine the indicative mood ² with the subjunctive one ³, yoking a coldly demystified sense of the present to a warmly imaginative leap beyond it. It must repsect and refuse the world in the same act. The mind is called upon to be both mirror and lamp, faithfully reflecting its surroundings while shedding a transformative light upon them. The flights of fantasy which get in the way of trying to see the situation straight are vital to imagining an alternative to it. We must be moved by visions of a future in which men and women would be made physically sick by the act of dominating others, while remaining stony-faced and churlishly suspicious before the blandishments of the present. If the Romantic conforms the world to his or her desire, and the realist conforms the mind to the world, the revolutionary is called upon to do both at once.

In this sense, radical politics demand a strangely hybrid kind of human being, one who is both more sceptical and more trustful than the average run of folk. Such characters are more gloomy in their view of the past and present than most conservatives, but also more open to a transformed future than most liberal reformists. Because what is awry with the the present is a structural affair, it runs far deeper than individual folly or knavery, which is the bad news; but for the same reason it can in principle be changed, which is the good news. It is when radicals are decried as Jeremiahs by the liberals and as starry-eyed utopianists byt he conservatives that they know they have got it more or less right.

1. Terry Eagleton, Figures of Dissent (London: Verso, 2005). [↩]
2. For the non English major, the indicative mood expresses facts or a factual condition, e.g. “Kevin is damned” [↩]
3. The subjunctive mood expresses wishes, possibilites, hypotheses, things that aren’t true presently, e.g. Kevin be damned [↩]