The war on the past, with Frank Furedi – Part 3

Frank Furedi with Will Kingston | 16 October 2024 I Spectator Australia

TRANSCRIPT - Part 3

Welcome to ‘Fire At Will’.  A Spectator Australia Podcast.

A safe space for dangerous conversations. I’m Will Kingston.

– Will Kingston –

Yes. It’s an incredibly depressing ideology when you put it that way. I was speaking to Yasha Monk on this podcast not so long ago and we were talking about the term Cultural Marxism. He had a problem with the term cultural Marxism because Marxism is an economic concept but more importantly, there is that end goal of the workers' paradise and some form of utopia - it is a bit unclear how you get there but that is the end goal. The sad and troubling thing about this War on the Past, is you’re right, there is no end utopia so it is in that respect a form of Cultural Marxism because that endpoint is very different. In fact, the endpoint is very unclear.

– Frank Furedi –

It is. I don't even like the term Cultural Marxism, because Marxism was about transformative economics. I don’t think that’s suitable. Cultural Marxism was devoted to creating a new world. A utopian conception that was utterly unrealistic, but it inspired people. It was building something that did not exist.

Now what you have is a situation that is questioning humanity’s past achievements. That human beings are incapable of building or constructing anything positive in the future. That’s the logic and why it’s so depressing is because it teaches our youth that human beings have systematically failed to do something good and worthwhile. So, kids grow up thinking there isn’t much hope in humanity and the future.

That’s a pessimistic and cynical attitude deeply embedded in this War Against the Past.

– Will Kingston –

That’s interesting because my understanding of the Left throughout modern history is that they have primarily had an optimistic view of the potential human condition. It’s generally been the Right that has had a more realist and cynical view of human behaviour - and that then informs their respective ideologies.

How has the Left gone from having that optimistic view of the human condition to this new form of ideology which is fundamentally pessimistic about human behaviour?

– Frank Furedi –

We need to pause and reflect on the term ‘Left’. Is the contemporary Left similar to what the Left was in the past or have all these labels like Left and Right changed? I think the contemporary Left has imploded to the point where its key ideals are no longer being put forward. The contemporary Left is involved in identity politics. You can call them ‘Identitarians’ so you can call them ‘Woke’.

Currently, we are struggling to find a name that adequately describes them but in a sense, you’ve got a movement whose only possible connection with the past is that they hate everything about the world as it is. But their hatred for the world does not mean that they’ve got any idea of how to use that destruction for positive purposes.

It is a very unusual and very kind of unique development that has occurred in modern times We are so stuck in the present that we are losing sight of any possible way of getting out of a predicament or creating something that is a better version of the world that currently exists.

– Will Kingston –

That is the third or the fourth chapter on the concept of ‘Presentism’. You say in that chapter that the Year Zero demolition of the past is sustained by a zeitgeist that is obsessively focused on the present.

What are the reasons for this modern day Presentism that we could find ourselves in?

– Frank Furedi –

The chapter on Presentism is based on the notion that one of the things that has occurred - almost unperceptively but now it’s very clear- is that the temporal distinction between the p[resent and the past has been destroyed.

For example, many people who hate The West seek to colonise the past, virtually expecting that they can fix the problems with the past. Thereby redeeming themselves instead of dealing with the problems of today, they’re more comfortable giving lectures on how to rewrite Shakespeare’s plays by exorcising his apparent racism. What they are saying is that they can teach Shakespeare a lesson. They are doing this with many historical figures, like Aristotle for example.

By targeting these historical figures as if they’re alive, the Left is treating them as if they are their peers. There is a sense that the past is being colonised to the point where the distinction between the present and the past no longer exists. I call this the ‘Ever-Present’. The present goes back to the beginning of time and one almost forgets that there is a distinction between our life at the moment and something that happened 2,000 years ago.

– Will Kingston –

This strikes me as having this incredible ignorance and arrogance associated with it. People 2000 years in the future won’t think the way that we behave or acted was contingent on our context as well. It’s almost as if we now have adequate information to be able to make moral judgements on our history.

Logically I find it difficult to get my head around this.

– Frank Furedi –

Logic is not the strong point of this movement. What the they are saying is that people living now are so enlightened that they simply know more than people that lived in the past. They are a better people. So, there is an arrogance suggesting people in the past were morally inferior.

Not only that they had less knowledge than we have in the present, which is something that I find extremely troubling, that you could have that kind of paternalistic arrogance and not understand that the world is built upon the struggles and accomplishments of successive generations from the past.

We are the beneficiaries of those people that we look down upon, and instead of having a humble opinion of ourselves as the product of an interesting intellectual and moral journey over the centuries, we pretend that everything that is good and positive starts with us.

– Will Kingston –

How much of this comes down to both a school and university level, in the sense that we are not as good at teaching the great things that happened throughout our history and what we have to be grateful for. Does this play into this?

– Frank Furedi –

It does. But that process is the consequence of what happened beforehand. Schooling has become a form of indoctrination and reflects the values and society that we live in. Young people are systematically dispossessed of their intellectual and moral inheritance and are in a sense not able to benefit from the insights of their ancestors.

On the contrary, it’s about turning young people against their ancestors and telling young people you know better than your parents did. For example, look at sex education, which I’m very interested in, because of its sociological importance, 7 or 8-year-old kids are being told, “You probably understand your sexuality better than your parents, so, instead of listening to them, you should do what you think is best, listen to your teachers.”

This conscious attempt to separate the generations from one another, is not just bad teaching but an insidious form of education that has been institutionalised recently.

End Part 3