> We - and I'm including myself in this - are rather lacking in a
> compelling vision of the future. Part of the reason may be that we've
> lost that old Hegelian/Marxist trick of finding the seeds of the new
> in the belly of the old. So much left discourse is about horrors -
> exploitation, genocide, heat death of the universe, the evils of
> "globalization," the crimes of Howard Stern - that people don't want
> to listen to us, and we have no plausible strategy for making things
> any better.
I agree with you about this. What are the obstacles in the way of it though?
Why are we unrealistic about "horrors"? Why do we tend to manichean, apocalyptic visions in which a messianic object magically appears and leads the "good" off into heaven while destroying the "evil" in an orgy of hateful, sadistic violence? What explains the appeal of "antifhumanism" in comparison with "humanism" (as found, say, in Nussbaum's idea of "cosmopolitanism")? Why are we fascinated by violent transgression? What stands in the way of a realistic appraisal of the sixties which, as is true of manic periods in general, had bad (e.g. what Freud calls "the psychological poverty of groups") mixed in with good (no Shakespeare though)?
I think there are seeds, but finding and nurturing them is no easy matter. In Kurosawa's To Live, the Faustian protagonist has a very difficult time discovering what it would be "to live" and when he does manage this finds he has to draw on the whole of his new won strength and reason to figure out how to accomplish the reform that produces the moment to which he can say stay and then joyfully take his leave - swinging on a child's swing in a playground he and a group of women have managed to create out of a bit of ugly, polluted urban space. This represents what I would call "scientific socialism," i.e. rational optimism.
Ted