Cuba and the Ideological Trap
The protests in Cuba — and potentially the revolution in Cuba — are eleven million different stories, each with between sixty and five hundred years of history informing their independent trajectories, but they are pointing in the same direction: People can become hungry enough, and tired enough to take on monsters. I can’t speak to the level of suffering that has driven Cubans to the streets, but I am already cringing from the spectators’ reactions up north, where ideologies will guide much of the parsing.
Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio will see all of the Fidelista brutality, and none of the history of Imperialism’s wrongs. Socialist Twitter — and likely a few choice Dems — will cast Uncle Sam as el único diablo, and forgive or excuse 60 years of authoritarian monstrosity as somehow justified. They’ll pick sides, and grab microphones, and then turn back toward savaging one another, all with full bellies and no real fear of existential collapse.
Blech.
One of the most trenchant observers of the world in the last few hundred years was Isaiah Berlin, Latvian-born British scholar, and historian of ideas who set a high bar for pragmatism and rationality in judging human events. He noted somewhere along the line — I can’t pull the citation now, it’s been too long since I’ve done the reading — referring to the twentieth century as an era of final solutions. That an Eastern European Jew, in the wake of World War II, would choose to make that noun plural is really something — but it speaks to his clarity of vision.
We live in a world constructed from ideas forged in the past — but the controlling metaphor of Western philosophical thought for the past several hundred years was initially articulated by a French intellectual to whom Berlin was reacting — Rene Descartes. Descartes conceived a rational universe that was not unlike a grand, possibly infinite clock — with God as the gear-smith and designer. Issac Newton took Descartes’s model and through his own particular genius, intuited a few rules by which God had set that clock to motion. Following Descartes and Newton, Diderot and Rousseau and Montesquieu and Locke applied those notions of a rational, understandable, mechanical universe to political theory and began to sketch out notions for a perfectible social order — a model by which we could form a government that would mirror the rationality of the heavens.
That revolution in thought was a great blessing to a world mired in fantasy and fealty, in that it gave rise to the notions of democracy and personal liberty — but it also rationalized and legitimized a tendency toward brutality and authoritarianism in the service of achieving some rarefied goal of a perfect world. Ugly and painful as it is to say, Nazism and Fascism and Communism grew from the seeds of Enlightenment that Descartes and Newton planted, just as much as Democracy.
That is what Berlin was referencing when he referred to the 20th century as “a century of Final Solutions.”
Nazism was a Final Solution.
Communism was a Final Solution.
Free Market Capitalism was a Final Solution.
Permanent Revolution was a Final Solution.
Fidelism was a Final Solution.
Each of those Final Solutions found adherents who could excuse the brutality of today when justified with the rewards of tomorrow; you know, when we finally get it right! Each of those Final Solutions found adherents who could excuse the brutality of their fellow travelers as justified by the excesses of someone else’s terror. That is as concise a history of the Cold War as you’ll ever find.
Yet, through all this, folks all over the world who’ve never had the luxury and the social privilege to afford an education with a meal plan, housing, and access to books by Descartes, Newton, Berlin, and the rest like I did, were just trying to make it from one day to the next, and from meal to meager meal.
Those folks — most of them better educated than I’ll ever be in the ways of the world, and many of them far better read than I’ll ever be on the history of Western Philosophy — are now in the streets. I don’t know what’s going to happen with them, but I hope to god that they’ll be able to build their new world without the fusillades of ideologues forever locked in a battlespace delimited by the philosophies of a former era.
Said otherwise, I hope to god my allies on the left are smart enough to not get in line behind a teetering “socialist” beast because it bears some passing resemblance to a past that never was and a future that could never be. But I expect some will. Such is the power of ideology. From my end, I’ll hope that whatever comes next in Cuba breaks free from the stultifying notion that we’ll ever get this society thing right — because the very notion of “finality” in our solutions is a fundamental part of the problem
