Philip Koop on The Future, Now and Then

"Isn’t it just as plausible that, if you think things are getting better, you will grab everything you can, guilt-free, confident that a rising tide will inevitably lift all boats?" Timothy Snyder calls this "the politics of inevitability". He identifies this with neoliberalism (if democracy is, as Thatcher claimed, "the only alternative", then we don't have to do anything special to bring it about or maintain it), but also dialectical Marxism (the course of future history is constrained to follow a fixed sequence of steps; we can hasten or retard this progression but not alter it.) An important element of this politics is the belief that history is ordained by vast structural forces and that consequentially individual action is irrelevant. All this is contrasted with "the politics of eternity" which I won't get into here, except to dumb down to the politics of fascism. The pragmatic view he paints in light of this is that, while the scope of individual action is of course constrained by circumstances, nothing happens without individual agents making it happen. We all have the opportunity and also the duty to shape the future, a little bit. In the context of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, he remarks that IR theorists expected Zelenskyy to cut and run. When he publicly stated that he expected the opposite, he was politely but uniformly contradicted ("while I respect the work that professor Snyder has done" etc.) He unkindly but probably accurately says that there was a simple reason why they thought Zelenskyy would run: it is what they would have done. If you believe in the politics of inevitability, it is the only rational thing to do. How can one individual oppose cosmic structural forces? But when he asked Zelenskyy about this, the reply was "I couldn't have run and remained the same person." There's a lesson there, I think. On an unrelated note, have you been reading Manu Saadia's substack "Against Mars", on the techbro dream of extraterresrial colonization? I recommend it.