Presentism
Cult of the present, of the moment, of fashion — a cult distinct to Western society — forgetful of the past and indifferent to the future.
Presentism is a form of blindness — it’s the behaviour of ‘those whose eyes are on the ground, not the sky, not on what’s before or behind them’ — in the expression of the Breton painter and identitarian Yann-Ber Tillenon.[1]
The long-term is never taken into account. Future generations don’t count, the notion of lineage, like that of foresight, is absent. Only the ‘present generation’ counts. But when a fashion ceases to be fashionable, ‘its look’, as Olivier Carré[2] says, ‘becomes tacky’.
Presentism fosters contempt for the survival of one’s people. It’s a consequence of a narcissistic individualism and the bourgeois spirit. It’s become a way of refusing a common future and a common past, memory and foresight, enrootment and collective ambition, identity and continuity. Contemporary civilisation is smothered in presentism, which makes it extremely fragile, since it refuses to anticipate the crises that will inevitably befall it; for example, the threat of ethnic civil war, the inescapable clash with Islam, the dramatic economic consequences of an ageing population, the ecological effects of increased pollution and higher atmospheric temperatures, etc. Presentism affects the public spirit in general, as well as large economic groups, whose strategies are geared to short-term financial performance; it similarly limits political ambitions to the horizon of the next election and the international community fails to reduce the harmful emission of polluting gases. The fate of coming generations has become, in a word, the least of this civilisation’s concerns.
Presentism is both the infantile demand for everything right now and the undivided reign of the hic et nunc.
(see economism; modernity)
