Progressive Presentism

Politics of the Eternal Now

My timeline at the moment, much to the surprise (or lack thereof depending if you follow this scene closely) was the discussions over a certain Sweet Baby Inc. and the ghost of GamerGate. It has certainly been a wild ride these last few days, as many of us felt a sense of Déjà vu as the events of the last ten years are seemingly here once again right before us. As I had said on the most recent episode of the show I co-host, The Digital Archipelago, we are in a position where our political analysis is the eternal recurrence of the eternal now. We see this primarily on the left, and of the ideologues of our ruling elite and their talking heads that all things past, present, and future must be viewed in the lens of the now. I wanted to talk about this, especially as the past is constantly undergoing a process of reification to take the abstract evils that progressives say the past was full of, and make them more and more concrete and real in their catechetical application of understanding history to themselves and the young.

In doing so, the Eternal Now seeks to apply presentism into all things, an all encompassing worldview where there is only now, the moral of now, and tomorrow will have morals of now that will get them one step closer to a world like now but better although it will still have the same politics and morals of the present age. It’s a useful narrative tool for the formation of political formulas, which is best reflected in our discursive and pop culture spaces. A good example of this would be Seth McFarlane’s The Orville television series, (and the Star Trek it tries to emulate) covering the contemporary social issues of our days through liberal reasoning on the issues of sex, gender, and artificial intelligence. It has a catechetical application to it as well, that if we are to roam the stars and bring peace and the Enlightenment to our galactic friends we must be prepared to be coercive with our gay space liberalism, traditional alien cultures be damned. Even the future, however we can conceive of it today is more and more like our present age than anything truly alien or otherworldly. Perhaps this is a limitation I am being too harsh on, as it is our present time in which take inspiration to write and create worlds but politically and civilizationally speaking we find ourselves in a time where there is no future but through the now, the past must be hated because of the politics of the now, and now is the eternal present which must stamp out any alternative to the now.