The Owl of Minerva Takes Flight

I've been trawling through the back-pages of this blog, looking for candidate posts for more volumes in the Selections from Idiotic Hat series. This time, I've primarily been looking for material falling into the rough categories of "photography", "art", and "the meaning of life", insofar as these can usefully be separated: tricky! In the process, certain other old posts have been catching my eye, and it seemed like a good idea to give some of them a fresh airing, particularly those that will probably never make it into any collected "best of" volume.

In the posts for January 2012 I found this one, The Owl of Minerva, which is oddly prescient, I think. Not on my part, I hasten to add, unless the ability to grab straws in the wind already noted by genuinely insightful observers of the contemporary scene counts as a kind of wisdom in its own right. [1] Garry Trudeau is surely one of the most acute of those observers, and his Doonesbury strip has been my main source of insight into Americana for very many years. Which may explain why I've never been back there since a trip to stay with friends in Oakland, CA in 1980. So:

The Owl of Minerva

Here's an enlightening quote, from the "Blowback" section of Doonesbury, commenting on a recent strip (22/12/2011):

The quote in the first panel of today's strip comes from "Faith, Certainty and the Presidency of George W. Bush," Ron Suskind's terrifying article in the NYT Magazine of October 17, 2004. Here's the full quote, which reveals just how delusional that administration was: "In the summer of 2002, after I had written an article in Esquire that the White House didn't like about Bush's former communications director, Karen Hughes, I had a meeting with a senior adviser to Bush. He expressed the White House's displeasure, and then he told me something that at the time I didn't fully comprehend – but which I now believe gets to the very heart of the Bush presidency. The aide said that guys like me were 'in what we call the reality-based community,' which he defined as people who 'believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.' I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. 'That's not the way the world really works anymore,' he continued. 'We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality – judiciously, as you will – we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.'" My guess is that the senior aide was Karl Rove, but who knows? They were all crazy.

Scary, or what? It seems post-modernism has been driving the policies of the most powerful nation on earth. On the other hand, if you think about it, is post-modernism as a creed any more scary than fundamentalist or "End Times" Christianity? And, if you think about it a little further, Rove (or whoever it was) is pretty much stating a reality. Here is Hegel, that exemplar of clearly-expressed common sense, writing in 1820:

One more word about teaching what the world ought to be: Philosophy always arrives too late to do any such teaching. As the thought of the world, philosophy appears only in the period after actuality has been achieved and has completed its formative process. The lesson of the concept, which necessarily is also taught by history, is that only in the ripeness of actuality does the ideal appear over against the real, and that only then does this ideal comprehend this same real world in its substance and build it up for itself into the configuration of an intellectual realm. When philosophy paints its grey in grey, then a configuration of life has grown old, and cannot be rejuvenated by this grey in grey, but only understood; the Owl of Minerva takes flight only as the dusk begins to fall.
Preface to The Philosophy of Right

Basically, what Hegel is saying – trust me – is what everyone (except experts) knows to be true about complex social events: that experts always get them wrong, until they've become history. But lack of understanding never prevented a politician from acting, and acts, however stupid, always have consequences. What those consequences are, we only discover afterwards. Sometimes, long afterwards.

In 1972 Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai was asked about the consequences of the French Revolution and, famously, he confused the events of 1789 with les événements of May 1968 and as a consequence delivered up an unintended but much quoted bon mot: "Too soon to tell", he replied.

Excellent! It seems that sometimes the Owl of Minerva can be knocked out of her tree prematurely, if only briefly, and by accident...

1. This reminds me of an anecdote I was once told about an exam scenario, in which one of the questions involved envisaging a certain diagram reversed horizontally. One child had the brainwave of turning the paper over and holding it up towards the window; only one other realised what he was doing and did the same. Thus demonstrating two different kinds of intelligence. Or, um, cheating, if you prefer.