Taking the long view

For Deleuze, Nietzsche was the great anti-Hegelian. And while profoundly at odds with one another in rather fundamental ways, both Nietzsche and Hegel would nevertheless have agreed that truth is often hidden within its apparent opposite. This principle has important implications for how we understand social processes and events, and also how we evaluate them. Both Nietzsche and Hegel teach us to take what Max Weber called “the long view” (see his great essay, “Science as a Vocation”) in which we assess events in relation to their long-term impact on culture and society.

For Deleuze, Nietzsche was the great anti-Hegelian. And while profoundly at odds with one another in rather fundamental ways, both Nietzsche and Hegel would nevertheless have agreed that truth is often hidden within its apparent opposite. This principle has important implications for how we understand social processes and events, and also how we evaluate them. Both Nietzsche and Hegel teach us to take what Max Weber called “the long view” (see his great essay, “Science as a Vocation”) in which we assess events in relation to their long-term impact on culture and society.

The global economic crisis may provide us with an interesting case study. With unemployment figures moving beyond the 2.4 million mark and the IFS predicting real term cuts to public spending of 7 per cent from 2011, it is difficult to shape a positive story out the global recession. But from very different perspectives, recent speakers at RSA, the economist Nassim Taleb and the communitarian philosopher Amitai Etzioni both warn against viewing the near collapse of the global financial system as an unambiguous disaster. For both, the economic crisis may have profound and positive long-term benefits.

For Taleb, the long-term benefit might turn out to be a fundamental change in economic policy built around growing recognition that a robust global financial system needs to produce frequent crashes - but with citizens immune to them - rather than infrequent total collapses that cannot be coped with. And for Etzioni, the current economic crisis holds the possibility  for a “radical transformation” in the cultural value-systems of the UK and US with “communitarian and transcendental pursuits” replacing consumerism as our dominant modes of living and evaluating ‘success’.

While certainly attracted to aspects of Etzioni’s work and thinking, it is not my intention to validate the substance of his views; less still Taleb’s. But what I do like is the focus of both on cultivating something like a ‘social imaginary’ (see Charles Taylor’s essay) in which we turn the economic crisis into a condition of possibility for making positive and fundamental changes to society and the lives we lead.

It is improbable but not impossible that the consensus in fifty years time will be to interpret the collapse of Lehman Brothers as a kind of political ground-zero in at least two important respects: First, the precise point in which the emergence of a new progressive politics and social philosophy of the common good became possible. Second, the precise moment  neo-liberal orthodoxy in public and economic policy self-destructed and unmasked itself as a deranged mythology driven not by the ‘rationality’ of the market but the ideology of homo economicus and its impoverished conception of people not as citizens but consumers (see the last of Michael Sandel’s Reith Lectures this year).