"'The Future' Becomes a Kind of Moral Magnet"

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

*****   _Stanford Electronic Humanities Review_ 5.1
Contested Polities: Religious Disciplines & Structures of Modernity
Updated February 27, 1996

interview
Talal Asad
modern power and the reconfiguration of religious traditions
Saba Mahmood

...[Saba Mahmood]  You also argue in your book Genealogies of 
Religion that modernity, by definition, is a teleological project in 
its desire to remake history, the nation, and the future.  You argue 
that "actions seeking to maintain the local status quo are therefore 
always resisting the future."[1]  Could you please speak to what you 
meant by this?

[Talal Asad]  I meant that ironically, of course.  I think what I 
said was that actions that only maintain the status quo -- to 
conserve daily life -- are not thought of as "making history," 
however long such efforts take.  And movements which could be branded 
as "reactionary" were by definition trying "to resist the future" or 
"to turn the clock back."  The point is that the advocates and 
defenders of Western modernity are explicitly committed to a certain 
kind of historicity, a temporal movement of social life in which "the 
future" pulls us forward.  The idea is that, in some measure, "the 
future" represents something that can be anticipated and should be 
desired, and that at least the direction of that desirable future is 
known.  The "future" becomes a kind of moral magnet, out there, 
pulling us toward itself.  On the one hand, humans are thought of as 
having the freedom to shape their own (collective) destiny.  On the 
other hand, "history," as an autonomous movement, has its own 
momentum, and those who act on a different assumption are thought of 
as being either morally blameworthy or practically self-defeating -- 
or both.  The concept of history-making relates to this grand and 
somewhat contradictory idea.  And all societies -- including 
non-Western ones -- are judged by the phrases you quote.  I briefly 
mentioned the frequent derogatory references to the situation in what 
has happened and is happening in Iran, to cargo cults, etc.  My point 
is not that one should not criticize -- or even denounce -- what has 
happened and is happening in Iran, say.  My point is that most people 
who do so are also employing a very peculiar notion of "history" and 
"history-making."...

<http://www.stanford.edu/group/SHR/5-1/text/asad.html>   *****

Talal Asad's remark that "Western modernity" represents the future as 
"a kind of moral magnet" is intriguing.  However, enslavement to the 
future is not unique to what is called "the West" -- it's rather 
proper to M-C-M'.
-- 
Yoshie

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