Nathan Gardels is the editor-in-chief of Noema Magazine. He is also the co-founder of and a senior adviser to the Berggruen Institute.
Recently, the philosopher Slavoj Žižek gave a lecture on “a quantum theory of history” at the Berggruen Institute Europe’s Casa de Tre Oci in Venice.
For Žižek, all major ideologies, from Liberalism to Marxism, believe history has a direction that moves inexorably toward their universal realization. But today, he maintains, we live in a moment where you can’t draw a straight line to the future.
As Žižek argued in a video interview prior to the lecture, the notion of “superposition” in quantum physics “fits our circumstances perfectly.” In this condition, multiple, non-universal configurations, or states of being, can exist simultaneously on trajectories that are not predetermined.
“We live in a situation,” he says, “where we have the remnants of the progressive, Enlightenment European dream. Then we also have something very different … which is precisely the anti-Enlightenment. I sometimes call this ‘soft fascism.’” It is not the same as totalistic Nazism. Rather, it combines the dynamism of capitalism with a strong state rooted in ethnic or religious traditional ideology to cement social bonds that would otherwise fray amid the dislocations of unleashed animal spirits.
In Žižek’s view, you see this everywhere. “In China, as Xi Jinping recently said, ‘We need to teach young people what? Not Mao, but Confucian tradition.’ Then you have Modi in India, Erdogan in Turkey and Putin in his own way in Russia.” Trump’s America now joins the mix. Instead of some harmoniously balanced multipolar order, Žižek sees each “trying to create their own small empire” in a discordant world.
Both the Enlightenment and anti-Enlightenment strains live side by side, neither with a determinist advantage in the long run, and both in a state of perpetual transformation.
In short, history is open in all directions. There is no through line you can draw that will tell us where it will all go and where it will end up. There are a multitude of possibilities and arrays of conditions everywhere, all at once, that will only have looked inevitable in retrospect.
What we are learning about nature through quantum physics changes our very concept of being. For Žižek, this means we must also change the ontological foundations of our perception of history. We now know that nature is neither stable nor linear, but mostly in a state of perpetual flux and plural potentiality that only apparently crystallizes when we observe contingent circumstances converging at a given time in a given space.
Žižek’s perspective corresponds with an intuition the Nobel Prize-winning poet Octavio Paz related to me in a conversation once in Mexico City toward the end of the Cold War.
Paz believed that “temporal succession no longer rules the imagination” after all the utopias of modern progress failed to pan out. As both a student of Eastern philosophy as well as a follower of the early glimmers of quantum physics, he saw that “we live instead in the conjunction of times and spaces, of synchronicity and confluence, which converge in the ‘pure time’ of the instant,” or, as he also put it, “time without measure.” Coherence and equilibrium are “the momentary exception” in the random swirl of disequilibrium that is the rule. For Paz, the rhythm of time is cyclical, following this pattern.
All this brings to mind the adage of the contemporary quantum physicist Carlo Rovelli, who said that being is a “momentary get together on the sand,” briefly coming together and then disaggregating, coming together again in another configuration, and so on.
Quantum Daoism
Žižek’s insight corresponds as well to another thinker we’ve published in Noema, the Daoist scholar Dingxin Zhao. He offers a dialectical frame for understanding how history unfolds that is deeper than Hegel’s Western conception precisely because it disavows any set destiny.
Zhao recounts the Daoist perspective that history does not progress toward some teleological terminus that can “lay claim to universal or eternal truths … because the significance and function of any causal forces invariably change with different contexts.” The elusive Way unfolding across contingent time “not only rejects the imposition of a direction onto history but also negates the existence of any specific, law-like forces underpinning the apparent cyclic patterns of historical events.”
As Laozi wrote in the Tao Te Ching “the Dao that can be stated cannot be the universal (or eternal) Dao” because the concrete circumstances of existence are always in flux. It is all about the conjunction of relations revealed at a moment in time and a place in space.
This understanding of the indeterminate direction of history not only departs from the modern paradigm of historical progression rooted in Judeo-Christian eschatology, or theology of destiny, but embraces its opposite in the “principle of reverse movement.” History can go forward, backward or sideways.
Just as every phenomenon contains its opposite, so too, by this principle, every achievement of power carries the seeds of its own undoing within.
“In the Daoist principle of reverse movement, as one actor in military or economic competition progressively secures the upper hand, opposing actors would also gather momentum,” Zhao writes. “For instance, the dominant actor becomes increasingly susceptible to various errors — over-expansion, underestimating adversaries, disregarding internal vulnerabilities and potential crises. Meanwhile, weaker actors respond to their more formidable opponent by intensifying their desire to change, including learning from their opponent and striving for ‘self-strengthening’.”
The principle of reverse movement also “cautions us against the hubris of making linear predictions about upward-trending social tides and urges us to embrace the intricacies of complexity and acknowledge the multifaceted interplay of diverse forces. By doing so, we are compelled to appreciate the heterogeneous nature of historical change.”
History Won’t End At Soft Fascism
Barring a shift in the present correlation of forces, Žižek sees soft fascism gaining traction in the near term over the remnants of the Enlightenment dream. Now that America has gone rogue with its turn to Trumpism, “Europe is our last hope,” as he puts it. At least, for now, it is striving to get beyond the haunting tribal passions of its past through norms and transnational institutions governed by law and the rule of reason.
There is no telling where the future will go. But it won’t end at soft fascism, which, per the principle of the reverse movement of history, is, by its very ascendance, laying the ground for its own ruination. Perhaps the radical splintering it fosters, just when the planetary imperative of coming together to face climate change is most pressing, will, of necessity, propel the next movement of history decisively in the opposite direction?
We will only know what the future holds when contingent circumstances, including the self-strengthening of opposing forces and the weakening of dominant ones, converge as time goes on to create an entirely new historical moment, different from anything that came before.
