Politically speaking what is a conservative? And what is a progressive? How do they differ? Are there fundamental differences to speak of? And what does all this have to do with Time?
Well, for the mean Time, I will only offer a conceptual analysis (nothing like the deep sort of analysis which would involve an historical recounting of the development of these concepts). At the surface of the matter, we have two concepts to account for, conservation and progression. In each, there are distinctive root values, and these root values can be taken as conceptually basis for each as at least one of the major markers of difference.
Conservation and Wisdom: History as the Natural Domain of the Elderly
What is conserved in conservation? And when one progresses, what is this progress towards? Of course, generally speaking, conservation conserves something already familiar, an older structure (and by which reasoning the "GOP" or "Good. Old. Party." is a most apt name); for, in calling them "good", we recall the Platonic notion of the Good, in the sense of "good versus evil", "good versus the bad". The drives, or directives—which, at the surface of the analysis, and in broad strokes, paints the party according to some one or more principles of unity—are towards a conservation of the former, of the "old", of historical precedent, of tradition, of a culture which has accomplished before the present (and perhaps, the Older, the Better?). And of course, they are a "party" precisely in the sense of a coming together under the banner of unity, of nationalistic statecraft, "love of country", love of motherland. In all of this, the principle of conservation remains more or less consistently available as a sort of moral compass. The good old days—which are doubtlessly the days of "youth", the days of greater vigor and strength—are but a dimming twilight, so that the future can only look bleaker, darker, less promising than the promises youth once whispered into dreamier ears. Doomsday, Judgment Day, the Eschaton, Kali-Yuga, the End Times, a constant ear to prophesy, to older voices, spoken in times now only dimly recalled, and through a veil of interpretations, and by minds far older than our own, fears first imbibed in youth, like some bloody ritual which foretold our own deaths—all of these add to and compound the gloom of the future, and make the Time after our deaths seem bright by comparison. As the glimmer of youth fades from our own bodies and long after the milk has dried up in our breasts, a new milk has been produced by the hopefulness that we have for the future generations, but one that is mixed with the poison of a thousand foreboding traumas, a life of hardship and the school of life, of hard knocks, now weak and weary, now fading fast, no longer as interested, accomplished but soon to perish, before the fruits can any longer be enjoyed like once before; the novelty of youth, the anxious and courageous uncertainty of younger and sharper eyes, now replaced by dimmer "wisdom", a feeling of "having already been there, and already having done that", now to pronounce judgment, to pass over the renewed youth the trauma of experience.
"Do Not Enter [without my eyes ahead of you]!" says wisdom to naivete. All prohibition and ritual injunction: all re-citation, all re-call, all re-membering what so long ago passed. So much for the conservative ideation.
Progression and Youth: Futurity as the Natural Domain of the Youth
What then of the progressive? Is all progress mere response to the conservative? Or is the novelty of youth ever truly without precedent? Can the elderly wisdom of a prior generation fail to see the future so clearly as that of newer eyes, with less of a dogmatic, ritualized vision? What does the youth see with his younger visions? Are not the eyes clearer? Is not the mind faster? Does not all the understanding of the aged pale before the agility of a soul entirely at home in its originality of experience? Before the youth has learned the bloody rituals? Before the mind has been bent low, it has always been looking "up" with a neck still tender with youth, with eyes still sharp like an eagle's, with ears honed like a bat's, with all the cleverness of an unbridled novelty, attuned to the "NOW!" which, like a foot race, is best borne by legs unarthritic, and bursting with power.
The growth of this power is all that progress requires; the aims may be manifold, the ideas may range over the whole field of human knowing, and even toward dark forests never yet ventured into. Something of the future always remains at the head, like a head-strong ship's captain, like an agile officer in protection of all the ship's men—the netṛ, the eyes for the society. Here the strength of the senses are not unlike that truth often related as secularism.
Here eyes are still unencumbered by the horses blinders: the horse in nature never had such blinders. It was entirely an invention of man to break the horse's free spirit by partially blinding him, so that he could only see what someone more clever, "wiser" had intended for him to see; the "domesticated" horse is a fascinating example of the effects of censorship. By this partial blinding, the horse is made to see the world as that much smaller (here the "world" has been diminished, replaced by a "domain", a finite range of domination).
The youth in virtually all societies are at first kept within such a "house", a capax, a room, in order that their strength might develop unencumbered by foreign powers which would destroy it before it reached the height of adulthood. When youths are left to fend for themselves—the feral child, or else the street-rat—they are inevitably made smaller; our methods of domestication are best attuned to our own kind; these methods were designed foremost for us, and only afterwards, for the animals we bind to our houses.
Youths are well known to be on average more progressive than adults. They do not yet feel the weight of historical time; they do not yet have a regard for history, nor time to learn it: their eyes are all trained on the present and future. They cannot expect to understand legacy with the same clarity as action and anticipation; their vital force always trains them to look forward, to contemplate adulthood as "when I grow up, I will!" Their youthful optimism is nothing but that anticipation of adulthood, to the maturation of their powers, to the ability to overcome whatever obstacles may yet present themselves.
The Divide of the Generations: The Meaning of the Now and of Time in General, Politically Speaking
What have we learned here?
The conservative and the progressive have eyes trained upon different facets of Time. The elder spirits judges the world through the cataract, embattled lens of their own past, and speak as the light of the youths, their offspring; they pontificate as guardian spirits for; they are mediators of the real, censors, the house-binders, the domesticators, the dominant, the prior guard. The spirit of youth looks to the future, to all that is yet unseen, to all that cannot yet be anticipated, but which with their sharpened eyes, might yet be the first to catch sight of what looms over the horizon of extreme futurity; eyes trained unto the plu-futural.
Nobody doubts that both the conservative and the progressive—to wit, the elderly minded, and the youthful minded—have an eye trained upon the present; and yet, even in this, they will differ in what they see. The unbridled youth will of course see much of what can yet be done; the wise elder will see the natural and historical limits in what has been done. The youth has an appetite for destruction, to tear apart the old in order to build up the new; the elder has little appetite, and wishes to retire from the hunt; they are chair-rockers, and story-tellers, wise-ones who impart lessons of effort and loss, who always keep an eye to the failures of the past, who examine Time as the great destroyer, and who thus suspect the youth to always be forms of Time, something of an existential threat, even a destroyer of a loving Grandfather or Grandmother. Teaching compassion and restraint, conservation and the morality of the prophets, of the saints, of those in antiquity who did no harm, who remained "innocent"—to wit, who remained just like children—these are the muddy affections of a mind that has no mind for the exigencies of adulthood, who wishes the child might always retain their youth: here is a mind that resents all that Time introduces to life, and yet who is possessed by that same force, now made into a tincture, a noxious poison intended to stunt growth, a so-called ambrosia which does little more than ensure that the child will never achieve to the full growth of their power; a Bonzai tree, a man-made dwarf-man.
Of course, my thoughts are not without a touch of poison themselves; albeit, I do not conceal the warning signs any longer. The youth will, if he only lives long enough, need to traverse the path toward the horizon of the plu-futural, that "future of the future yet to come", without the guardians who first brought him to adulthood. The child must be allowed to become a man, must learn to take over the traditions of his elders, but without being destroyed by these traditions. The traditions do conserve something of value for him, but let not such a thought make him so soft that he forgets his own instincts; that destruction is an indispensable part of every new creation. What the child creates with crayon, now the man makes with steel, and clear concept. What the child needs is given in such a way that he knows not how to earn it; the man must break something to extract the value from it, and for this, he cannot rely upon the softness of youth. He must embrace a way of being which leads him even to depart from the lessons of his elders, indeed, from every uncritical vision of the past, from every "Golden Age", from every "Good, Old, Day".
Well, for the mean Time, I will only offer a conceptual analysis (nothing like the deep sort of analysis which would involve an historical recounting of the development of these concepts). At the surface of the matter, we have two concepts to account for, conservation and progression. In each, there are distinctive root values, and these root values can be taken as conceptually basis for each as at least one of the major markers of difference.
Conservation and Wisdom: History as the Natural Domain of the Elderly
What is conserved in conservation? And when one progresses, what is this progress towards? Of course, generally speaking, conservation conserves something already familiar, an older structure (and by which reasoning the "GOP" or "Good. Old. Party." is a most apt name); for, in calling them "good", we recall the Platonic notion of the Good, in the sense of "good versus evil", "good versus the bad". The drives, or directives—which, at the surface of the analysis, and in broad strokes, paints the party according to some one or more principles of unity—are towards a conservation of the former, of the "old", of historical precedent, of tradition, of a culture which has accomplished before the present (and perhaps, the Older, the Better?). And of course, they are a "party" precisely in the sense of a coming together under the banner of unity, of nationalistic statecraft, "love of country", love of motherland. In all of this, the principle of conservation remains more or less consistently available as a sort of moral compass. The good old days—which are doubtlessly the days of "youth", the days of greater vigor and strength—are but a dimming twilight, so that the future can only look bleaker, darker, less promising than the promises youth once whispered into dreamier ears. Doomsday, Judgment Day, the Eschaton, Kali-Yuga, the End Times, a constant ear to prophesy, to older voices, spoken in times now only dimly recalled, and through a veil of interpretations, and by minds far older than our own, fears first imbibed in youth, like some bloody ritual which foretold our own deaths—all of these add to and compound the gloom of the future, and make the Time after our deaths seem bright by comparison. As the glimmer of youth fades from our own bodies and long after the milk has dried up in our breasts, a new milk has been produced by the hopefulness that we have for the future generations, but one that is mixed with the poison of a thousand foreboding traumas, a life of hardship and the school of life, of hard knocks, now weak and weary, now fading fast, no longer as interested, accomplished but soon to perish, before the fruits can any longer be enjoyed like once before; the novelty of youth, the anxious and courageous uncertainty of younger and sharper eyes, now replaced by dimmer "wisdom", a feeling of "having already been there, and already having done that", now to pronounce judgment, to pass over the renewed youth the trauma of experience.
"Do Not Enter [without my eyes ahead of you]!" says wisdom to naivete. All prohibition and ritual injunction: all re-citation, all re-call, all re-membering what so long ago passed. So much for the conservative ideation.
Progression and Youth: Futurity as the Natural Domain of the Youth
What then of the progressive? Is all progress mere response to the conservative? Or is the novelty of youth ever truly without precedent? Can the elderly wisdom of a prior generation fail to see the future so clearly as that of newer eyes, with less of a dogmatic, ritualized vision? What does the youth see with his younger visions? Are not the eyes clearer? Is not the mind faster? Does not all the understanding of the aged pale before the agility of a soul entirely at home in its originality of experience? Before the youth has learned the bloody rituals? Before the mind has been bent low, it has always been looking "up" with a neck still tender with youth, with eyes still sharp like an eagle's, with ears honed like a bat's, with all the cleverness of an unbridled novelty, attuned to the "NOW!" which, like a foot race, is best borne by legs unarthritic, and bursting with power.
The growth of this power is all that progress requires; the aims may be manifold, the ideas may range over the whole field of human knowing, and even toward dark forests never yet ventured into. Something of the future always remains at the head, like a head-strong ship's captain, like an agile officer in protection of all the ship's men—the netṛ, the eyes for the society. Here the strength of the senses are not unlike that truth often related as secularism.
Here eyes are still unencumbered by the horses blinders: the horse in nature never had such blinders. It was entirely an invention of man to break the horse's free spirit by partially blinding him, so that he could only see what someone more clever, "wiser" had intended for him to see; the "domesticated" horse is a fascinating example of the effects of censorship. By this partial blinding, the horse is made to see the world as that much smaller (here the "world" has been diminished, replaced by a "domain", a finite range of domination).
The youth in virtually all societies are at first kept within such a "house", a capax, a room, in order that their strength might develop unencumbered by foreign powers which would destroy it before it reached the height of adulthood. When youths are left to fend for themselves—the feral child, or else the street-rat—they are inevitably made smaller; our methods of domestication are best attuned to our own kind; these methods were designed foremost for us, and only afterwards, for the animals we bind to our houses.
Youths are well known to be on average more progressive than adults. They do not yet feel the weight of historical time; they do not yet have a regard for history, nor time to learn it: their eyes are all trained on the present and future. They cannot expect to understand legacy with the same clarity as action and anticipation; their vital force always trains them to look forward, to contemplate adulthood as "when I grow up, I will!" Their youthful optimism is nothing but that anticipation of adulthood, to the maturation of their powers, to the ability to overcome whatever obstacles may yet present themselves.
The Divide of the Generations: The Meaning of the Now and of Time in General, Politically Speaking
What have we learned here?
The conservative and the progressive have eyes trained upon different facets of Time. The elder spirits judges the world through the cataract, embattled lens of their own past, and speak as the light of the youths, their offspring; they pontificate as guardian spirits for; they are mediators of the real, censors, the house-binders, the domesticators, the dominant, the prior guard. The spirit of youth looks to the future, to all that is yet unseen, to all that cannot yet be anticipated, but which with their sharpened eyes, might yet be the first to catch sight of what looms over the horizon of extreme futurity; eyes trained unto the plu-futural.
Nobody doubts that both the conservative and the progressive—to wit, the elderly minded, and the youthful minded—have an eye trained upon the present; and yet, even in this, they will differ in what they see. The unbridled youth will of course see much of what can yet be done; the wise elder will see the natural and historical limits in what has been done. The youth has an appetite for destruction, to tear apart the old in order to build up the new; the elder has little appetite, and wishes to retire from the hunt; they are chair-rockers, and story-tellers, wise-ones who impart lessons of effort and loss, who always keep an eye to the failures of the past, who examine Time as the great destroyer, and who thus suspect the youth to always be forms of Time, something of an existential threat, even a destroyer of a loving Grandfather or Grandmother. Teaching compassion and restraint, conservation and the morality of the prophets, of the saints, of those in antiquity who did no harm, who remained "innocent"—to wit, who remained just like children—these are the muddy affections of a mind that has no mind for the exigencies of adulthood, who wishes the child might always retain their youth: here is a mind that resents all that Time introduces to life, and yet who is possessed by that same force, now made into a tincture, a noxious poison intended to stunt growth, a so-called ambrosia which does little more than ensure that the child will never achieve to the full growth of their power; a Bonzai tree, a man-made dwarf-man.
Of course, my thoughts are not without a touch of poison themselves; albeit, I do not conceal the warning signs any longer. The youth will, if he only lives long enough, need to traverse the path toward the horizon of the plu-futural, that "future of the future yet to come", without the guardians who first brought him to adulthood. The child must be allowed to become a man, must learn to take over the traditions of his elders, but without being destroyed by these traditions. The traditions do conserve something of value for him, but let not such a thought make him so soft that he forgets his own instincts; that destruction is an indispensable part of every new creation. What the child creates with crayon, now the man makes with steel, and clear concept. What the child needs is given in such a way that he knows not how to earn it; the man must break something to extract the value from it, and for this, he cannot rely upon the softness of youth. He must embrace a way of being which leads him even to depart from the lessons of his elders, indeed, from every uncritical vision of the past, from every "Golden Age", from every "Good, Old, Day".
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