On the day that I read the first essay (Modernity and the Planes of Historicity) in Koselleck’s Futures Past, I also discovered a book by Susan George, published last year, Hijacking America. In Koselleck’s essay he makes the point that, during the emergence and consolidation of the new European Nation States and their governments, ‘ownership’ of the future was wrested by the State out of the hands of the religious authorities. The religious conception of the future was “the certainty that the Last Judgement would enforce a simple alternative between Good and Evil through the establishment of a single principle of behaviour”. From this time on the State and its rational prognostications calculate the possibilities of different futures and became responsible for the future. Part of this take-over consisted in the State repressing alternative religious and political predictions and claims about the future (rather as had the Roman Catholic Church previously – heresy was now delimited by the State rather than the Church). It is at this point, on the cusp of modernity, that the previous age could be seen as and labelled ‘medieval’. Grotius, in 1625, considered that the wish to fulfil predictions was one of the causes of unjust wars. According to Koselleck, “The facility with which anticipations of devout Christians, or predictions of all kinds, could be transformed into political action had disappeared by 1650”.
Which brings me to Susan George’s book. According to the publisher’s blurb the “American secular and religious right has made its “long march through the institutions” and changed the way Americans think. […] A broad alliance of neo-liberals, neo-conservatives and the religious right successfully manufactured a new common sense, assaulted Enlightenment values and targeted the top of society where culture is created and legitimized”.
Perhaps a clue here is the reference to an assault on Enlightenment values. Perhaps under the conditions of late modernity, when, according to Zygmunt Bauman, State based politics and power have become decoupled, the State has lost its monopoly hold on the future, and this is manifesting itself in the USA as a new ‘medievalism’. The predictions of some Christians, accompanied by freeloaders, carpet baggers and opportunists, are again being transformed into political action, defining heresy, and constructing the grounds of, from a secular viewpoint, unjust wars. The Christian Right in America have gone a long way in reclaiming the past through the successful promotion of Creationism (in its recent guise as intelligent design) through the education and political systems. Perhaps it is now in the business of reclaiming the future for its apocalyptic prophesy.