The world belongs to the savages. The Kennedy Center, Washington DC’s premier concert venue, has been renamed the Trump-Kennedy Center. The board decided unanimously – and Trump, who appointed the board, must have rejoiced. Finally! Him and Kennedy on the same level! Or almost. Donald’s name comes first.
This is a modern form of “damnatio memoriae” — condemnation of memory — a common practice among the most precarious Roman emperors.
To erase an uncomfortable predecessor from public memory, the tyrant of the day ordered his name, image, or deeds removed from statues, buildings, and even coins. After Caracalla murdered his brother Geta, not even money escaped his mad fury. The brother had to never have existed.
As the writer George Orwell would sum it up centuries later: he who controls the past controls the future – and he who controls the present controls the past.
Donald doesn’t erase, it’s true. He adds, that is to say, he defiles the past in order to crown himself in the present. But the attitude is the same: appropriate public space as if it were private territory. Where have we seen this before?
In recent years, of course, when it has become fashionable to demolish “problematic” statues, to rename streets or buildings with “consensual” names, to “decolonize” educational programs through the summary expulsion of white and Western authors – not to mention the rewriting of classic works so as not to offend the sensibilities of the contemporary reader.
Anyone who is outraged by the Trump-Kennedy Center, but applauds the supposedly progressive vandalism that has spread across the West, needs to at least do a sanity check.
After all, we are talking about two ways of reorganizing the public pantheon according to the whims of the present. The negative iconoclasm of those who destroy monuments and the positive iconoclasm of those who appropriate them are two versions of the same abuse. And both share the same root: presenteeism.
It was the historian François Hartog who established the concept. We live in a time where the present has become the only legitimate criterion of meaning. This involves two vices of thought.
On the one hand, the past is no longer considered a distant territory, with values and attitudes different from ours. He begins to function as a permanent accused, forced to comply with the moral (and circumstantial) criteria of today’s judges.
If our ancestors were racist, it follows that they must be rejected and erased from public memory – just as Caracalla did to his brother.
And there is no more immediate way to exorcise this past than to extract from the material heritage irrefutable proof of its existence.
But it’s not just the past that is dangerous. Presentism also condemns the future, denying it its autonomy and possibilities. When Trump adds his name to that of Kennedy on the facade of the institution, he anticipates the judgment of posterity – because, strictly speaking, there is no posterity. There is only one narcissistic present, formless and unlimited.
The fanatics who destroy the statues growl: “That name doesn’t deserve to be here!” » The fanatics who carry out Trump’s whims growl: “That name needs to be here!”
Some, in their presentist primitivism, see public space only as a cultural battlefield – and not as a living repository of those who have died, those who live and those who have not yet been born. If this battle were only cultural, it would be unbearable enough. The problem is that presentism comes with a high political price: modern democracy depends on an idea of the future.
As the philosopher Jonathan White explains in “Long term: the future as a political idea” (or long term: the future as a political idea), it is the possibility of a future – desirably better – that nourishes democratic virtues. When nothing stops immediately, defeats are temporary, waiting is tolerable and consensus becomes desirable.
According to White, contemporary democracies are poisoned by presenteeism. Just read the newspapers: everything comes down to permanent crisis management; everything is apocalyptic anxiety; everything is symbolic moralization: statues, books, even Havaianas!
Politically, contemporaries resemble laboratory rats frantically running around the wheel, going nowhere. The past does not exist. Neither does the future. What remains are the neuroses of the present, a sort of prison for body and soul. Should we remember that the fate of these rats is rarely inspiring?
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