Last year, before the last-minute Russian initiative defused the tension surrounding the war in Syria, Western governments openly called for Assad to be removed. Among the various reasons given to support the rebels to oust Assad and his regime, one particularly stands out. The comment below was made by then Sec. of State Hillary Clinton in Paris in July 2012 (see article here):
“The only way that will change is if every nation represented here directly and urgently makes it clear that Russia and China will pay a price. Because they are holding up progress, blockading it. That is no longer tolerable.”
That short sentence is particularly significant because it makes manifest the meta-logic of progress directing western policies and, ultimately, the West’s concept of History. To the former Secretary of State, progress is a force of history that must not be blocked, implying thereby that it is the movement by which history moves by itself. The problem with this scheme of things is that human politics then becomes irrelevant and meaningless as it is no longer free to act independently and to create something new. The best it can pretend to is to accompany this autonomous movement and make the way smooth for it to be implemented. We can draw the image of a statue already fully sculpted inside a block of marble, for which the sculptor’s sole job is to remove the unnecessary material covering the statue. In such a case, the sculptor would clearly not be regarded as an artist, but as a mere technician or, perhaps, janitor.
It is clear here that Clinton’s view of politics and history, which certainly reflects American and more generally, Western political thought, far from bringing freedom, as they claim, in fact negates and destroys it. In such a conception, human societies become mere servants of the law of progress, and those that oppose this law become obstacles to be removed. All other things set aside, this is the ideology that drove the two totalitarian movements of the 20th century. If the Marxian concept of History is an accurate description of modernity, then modernity leaves no room for human freedom, at least certainly not in the political sphere. Perhaps this explains the profound despair and endless search for freedom that we see daily. Is then our problem with modernity? We are certainly at a time we should start thinking about our place in history and, above all, about who we are.
