One of the strangest things in present (globalized) society is the worship of novelty. Whatever is new, instead of being seen as dangerous, untested, and so on, is automatically considered better. Some will spend the night outside a shop for the dubious privilege of paying a king’s ransom to be a guinea pig for some new electronic gizmo. The word “NEW” is festooned on all kinds of packaging, where it is read as “better than the stuff you liked last week”. The fact does not register that if you did like that stuff last week you would probably still like it today, and probably better than you’d like the new stuff. But that is how things go.
Having grown up in what could be described as the lost link between Communist and Capitalist economies (Brazil in the Seventies), I can remember pretty well how advertisers tried hard to make that trick work, to no avail. After all, there wasn’t any new stuff. For instance, as importing cars and motorcycles was forbidden, every year the factories installed in-country (Honda and Yamaha for bikes, Volkswagen, Ford, and Chevrolet for cars, basically) would release their new models, that were precisely the same as last year’s models, in different colors. A friend of mine always points out that there were something like 5 different brands of candies for kids, less than that of toys, and thus basically everybody, from all social classes, had the same toys and ate the same candies. She says a friend of hers from Eastern Germany told her it sounded just like home. Novelties of any kind would only come in the suitcases of friends who traveled abroad, and that was it. As it was forbidden to take more than (if I can remember) US$1,500 abroad, and there were no international credit cards or such, unless one’s friends were good at hiding their money when leaving the country they wouldn’t bring much either.
Even what would later become the runaway train engine of change, progressivism, was not that “progressive” back them. All we had was a few garden varieties of Communism and Fabian Socialism, each of them locked into its respective International. All that changed when the country was opened to foreign trade after the military gave up. Not only new and amazing material goods flood the market, but the Brazilian left quickly forgot about their former allegiances and started following the oh-so-ever-changing “progressive” ideals of the American left.
It was a curious phenomenon, especially because between the end of WWII and the beginning of military governments (in 1964), we had indeed had a small period of consumerist “progress”. That’s when all those foreign vehicle manufacturers opened factories in the country; that’s also when President Juscelino Kubitschek (or “JK”, to avoid spelling problems) built Brazil a brand new Capital in the middle of nothing. Brasília: a thoroughly MODERN city with no visible people, without corners, sidewalks, or neighborhood bars, centrally planned, and shaped like an airplane (I kid you not).
Before that, in the first half of the XXth Century, a very peculiar form of late XIXth-Century French “progressivism” had arrived: Kardecism, a Spiritist, reincarnationist “Cartesian” religion that called itself “Science, not Religion” based on supposed revelations given to a Frenchman by disincarnate spirits. It’s funny, in a sad way, because it used the language of XIXth-Century science in much the same way other snake-oil salesmen talk about quantum this or that nowadays. It was all about fluids, energies, vibrations, and such, and a vast part of the Brazilian middle-classes adopted it. Brazil is where lousy French ideas come to die. Together with séances, channeling, and so on, would come Esperanto and a feeling of superiority over benighted Catholics, who did not believe in the wise words of disincarnate spirits and did not know that after death everybody would go to a high-tech city in the sky, with electric tramways, telegraphs, and all other benefits of Progress, ruled by spirits of light, until it came the time to dress down in new flesh and start again.
XIXth-Century science would react in fury to what we nowadays assume to be the rule of science: paradigm shifts. On the contrary, they tended to believe they were really, really close to understanding everything. There were only a few secret cards still hidden in Nature’s hand, but soon they would all be revealed, once and for all. Pretty soon all would have been discovered, all would have been invented, and mankind would have reached a sort of materialist Paradise. The idea of permanent improvement just made no sense: after you got a good thing, why would one possibly want to change?!
It took a good while for what eventually became XIXth-Century science to get to that point. Self-assurance like that is not evident, after all. After all, it had all started in a quite different place, at least as seen from our present situation, with our present prejudices. What is science, after all, if not the systematic description of natural mechanisms? In other words, descriptions of how stuff goes when left by itself. The main point, though, is that left by itself part. In order to define the workings of Nature unaided, one first had to assume nobody is aiding it.
Well, first of all, what would Nature be? What about the influence (or not) of other planets, stars, constellations, and whatnot — astrology, in other words? Or, even worst, what about angels that keep nature running according to its own laws? Where are they? What did you people do with my cutesy little angels??!!, one or another version of a Creator would want to know.
We are going back in time — rather unnaturally, if you ask me, but, hey, it’s a nice literary device — and what we see just before Science-with-a-capital-S (the XIXth-Century kind, that knew stuff for sure once and for all) is quite literally magical. Let us take Sir Isaac Newton, for instance. The guy who made Universal Gravitation out of a falling apple. If not for him, we would still be able to float around all day. The jerk.
Well, he was much more of an alchemist, or a magician, or a sorcerer, than a prophetic prefiguration of Neil deGrasse Tyson. One goes looking for Carl Sagan, only to find Edgar Cayce. Or Walter Mercado.
Now, what was the main difference between Sir Newton and regular magicians from immediately before, such as Giordano Bruno and other Renaissance occultists? I’d venture to say it was how limited his worldview was. It was, in fact, as limited as, say, Kant’s, and for the very same reason: Puritanism, which both adhered to, denied all divine action in the world. It did not deny all that would be seen as pretty out-of-bounds for Modern Science, as — again — astrology. But it denied the very possibility of miracles, as well as anything that smelled of actual Divine action. They would affirm all things to have been created by God (or else peasants with torches and pitchforks could arrive all of a sudden), but after creating stuff He would have basically retired. To Florida, maybe, in order to create Florida Man.
That liminal denial was the origin of the idea of God as a watchmaker; Creation would be a thing that worked all by itself, without being kept in existence and movement by God. Watches need to be sprung (or, these days, have their batteries changed), but not Creation. Anything but God. Angels, out: we’re all grown-ups here.
It’s not that hard to see how that would eventually lead to such an extraordinary degree of vanity it made people really think they were about to understand all of reality. Or that pretty soon all that could be invented would have been invented, and that much before Ford’s Model T.
It’s worth noticing that all those novelties came without seeing in novelty by itself any worth. Quite the opposite, actually. Renaissance men were rediscovering the very old stuff of Classical Latin and Greek culture; Puritans thought they were getting rid of one and a half millennia of base accretions to a Pure Christianity they made up; XIXth-Century scientists were just identifying mechanisms in place since the Beginning of Time. Even Karl Marx, the guy who jumpstarted Leftism, saw himself as merely the discoverer of a kind of natural law, akin to Isaac Newton’s Universal Gravitation.
The cult of novelty for novelty’s sake is fundamentally an XXth-Century novelty, which can be dated to the disruption of the old model of Science as constant accretion (until all that is to be discovered or invented has been: pretty soon, by all means). Would it be a form of panic, a reaction to the new physics that soon would split the atom and murder thousands of innocent Japanese old men, women, and children?
All other “improvements”, in all other times, were to be permanent. When Joachim de Fiore concocted in the XIIth Century a New Age that would come, it would be something that stopped constant change, bringing perfection. Quite the opposite of XXth-Century ideas of things getting always better than they were before. Even poor old Darwin, to whom so much of the Cult of Novelty is attributed today, never dreamed of evolution as a constant improvement. It only meant that, among thousands of mutations, the ones that better fit their present circumstances would have a greater probability of survival. If circumstances changed, so would that probability.
One could point to Hegel and his peculiar vision of an increasingly divine State, but even that would lead to a final Paradise on Earth. Marx did not do much more than further immanentize the idea, making that (final and static) Paradise Communist.
The paradigm shift that brought us the cult of novelty, though, greatly affected Marxists in general. Most of the present Left, although paying Marx their respects, has kind of forgotten that his version of the Hegelian little waltz of thesis–antithesis–synthesis had a final post, a goal towards which it would be moving. It became just like the present view of evolution, in which everything would be increasingly better (the fact that for many Evolved Man would look like the Martians from Mars Attacks is but a minor detail).
When a leftist still gets shocked by the loss of some “conquest” (say, legal abortion), something that he considers to be almost as weird as time flowing backward, we can see that Marx still lives strong within him. But when the future is at once certainly better than the present and unknowable, we see the Cult of Novelty in action, and Marx himself is left behind by the roadside. After all, for instance, who could predict a few decades ago all the present trans craze? But if it did happen, for the present Left it is certainly an improvement on the past situation, as newer means better. Any leftist who clung to last Century’s leftist ideals is now a reprobate. Harry Potter lady, I’m talking about you.
That is a tremendous innovation in leftism; until a few decades ago the ideals would be eternal, and the material situation would change in order to reach them eventually. That was the trick behind the Left’s certainty of being able to predict the future. Now it is the very Spirit that changes, and it could be argued that material causes made it change.
The funniest about all that is how it happens at the same time in several different fields. The Cult of Novelty is what makes both JK Rowling and an old iPhone so passé. Capitalist consumerism and leftist utopism became Siamese twins, both believing all that’s new is better. Even more so, when tech meets woke and social media censors all that is not up-to-date either technologically (as when an old phone cannot run the present version of Instagram) or ideologically (as when an old Leftist cannot be allowed to say what used to be Leftist dogma). Or when parallel paths meet in, say, huge electric versions of already gigantic pickup trucks. Left-wing consumerism demands electric vehicles, and right-wing consumerism demands huge SUVs, and now both can be happy. It will probably save a few marriages, even if it makes no sense at all.
Post-Modernity, after all, is just Modernity on steroids, and all that is solid just melts into air. From the solidity of Leftist dogma to the solidity of Modern science, nothing can last.