Popper Says HISTORICISM A Lie

History is not something neatly evolving as the Lutheran Hegel believed in which God's rationale for History is "coming to know himself in time," so that only as The Owl of Minerva flew in the evening would we understand human history.

Against historicism, I prefer the open-ended notion of Karl Popper that we don't understand time and far less can we find in its past events a pattern that allows us to foretell the future. Marx thought that whoever owned "the means of production" would be the master of time. Marx saw history as the slow coming to power of the proletariat. Once they gained mastery of "the means of production" history would come to an end.

I don't know anyone who owns a factory or wants to produce one any longer. It's far too difficult to manage workers now because of all their rights and privileges and pensions. It's overwhelming. Most people would prefer to work for the state. You get all the privileges but aren't harassed by having to own anything. Everyone wants to sell the family farm and go to work for Uncle Sam.

In Lacan, you get the notion that speech is production, and so if we are to produce poetic speech, we are well, well. Well, well. I don't think this is enough because speech without a listener, or speech without a meaning, seems empty to me. I don't think of a shrink as being as important as God. I don't see a shrink as doing anything for anyone. Lacan, like Barthes and Foucault, was a solipsist who didn't believe in meaning.

Karl Popper was certainly against communism in which the state owns everything including the means of production. But he was for Scandinavian social democracies, and found that they incorporated the underdog workers well into the fabric of social well-being, spread education evenly, and wealth was spread evenly, too. But no one really listens to the Scandinavian social democracies. They speak in weird languages that no one outside their borders studies, or knows. Or next to no one.

Did Popper ever devote a single entire essay to the Scandinavian social democracies? Not that I know. He nods in their direction. Did he ever visit Finland or Sweden? Popper was raised as a Lutheran in Vienna but dropped out, and although his basic sense of fairness and freedom of inquiry may come out of the Lutheran ethos, he never credits Lutheranism for this, or notes that at the bottom of Scandinavian societies the central thread is Luther. While Marxism posits a rotten bourgeoisie that steals money from the poor, and an angelic proletariat that once it owns the machinery of production will behave in a soap opera fashion as the enlightened class (arugula eaters), Popper instead sees the struggle between classes as one facet of modernity but not the crucial aspect that Marx proposed to change through genocide. Genocide after genocide later we can see that all this did was terrify anyone from producing anything in communist societies. Result? Famine.

Popper argues instead that truly rapacious capitalism never existed (he sees Marxism as a soap opera or a hysterical farce that seizes on puppet-show reenactments of pure greed which never have in fact ever taken place in reality). "... today it is taught that power and money rule the world and always will. This is absolute nonsense. The exact opposite is true. You have only to look at the history of the United States, in which 800,000 people died for the freedom of Black people" (The Lesson of This Century, 39).

Popper grants that before Marx nothing like economic history existed, but he argues that history is a tissue of fictions that doesn't illuminate either the past the present or the future but forces patterns on these and discards anything that doesn't fit its Procrustean design. There are anomalies and paradoxes and perplexities that can't be cut into a clear story without making thought into a mockery. The very notion of an "avant-garde" is also a lie. It emerges after Marx as an attempt to be the driving force in the whirlwind of history. The avant-garde want to be "the invisible pilot at the eye of the storm," as Bakunin put it. The storm is neatly stacked into groups and movements, all of which mean nothing, since only individuals exist.

We posit another situation for the artist entirely. One in which the artist has no true idea of what's happening or where we are going. One in which a dialogue with God is perhaps as insane as that of Job's questions with regard to what was going on, forming into a lyrical and individual set of questions that remain close to God, and are always directed to him in a kind of prayer. Art is a personal dialogue with God.