A version of the following essay was originally published in the March 2020 issue of Current History
In the 2017 film Star Wars: The Last Jedi, the character Finn plans to sacrifice himself for the rebel cause by flying into the glowing-hot core of a giant weapon trained on the rebel hideout. As his rickety vessel speeds toward the target, he is sideswiped off his path by another rebel, Rose. When Finn asks Rose why she prevented his self- sacrifice, she replies: “That’s not how we’re going to win. Not fighting what we hate, [but] saving what we love.” It is difficult to imagine such a scene appearing in earlier Star Wars episodes.
Something in the zeitgeist has shifted decidedly in the direction of saving. From Saving Private Ryan (1998) to Children of Men (2006), Son of Saul (2015), and 1917 (2019), in landscapes of devastation and collapse of the social order, the heroic gesture is now to save something or someone very particular from generalized destruction. The current preservationist impulse is characterized by the desire to keep history, nature, nations, cities, rights, memories, and relationships in place. But what are its origins, and where will it lead?
Preservationist thinking has deep roots and formidable adversaries. Friedrich Nietzsche lamented its pervasiveness in Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883–85), commenting, “The most concerned ask today: ‘How is man to be preserved?’” This proclivity was all too “womanish,” in his view. “O nausea! Nausea! Nausea! That asks and asks and never grows weary: ‘How is man to be preserved best, longest, most agreeably?’ With that—they are the masters of today.”
But the preservationist drive also had its advocates. In 1917, US President Woodrow Wilson appealed to Congress for approval to enter the Great War, declaring, “The world must be made safe for democracy.” Confronted with unlimited German submarine attacks, which Wilson deemed “a warfare against mankind” and “a war against all nations,” the implication of his slogan was that democracy, like a rare species of flower, needed a special environment, a haven where it could not come under assault—and the world itself had to be that haven.
The first article of the German postwar constitution of 1949 set the preservationist drive as the primary function of the state: “Human dignity shall be inviolable. To respect and protect it shall be the duty of all state authority.”
Notably, these historical examples display universal or universalizing aspirations, referring to “the world” and “the human person.” Yet if there is nothing especially new about the preservationist impulse, there is indeed something new about the way liberal and some strands of leftist progressive thought more recently have framed this impulse as much more localized and specific. Certainly, movements like Extinction Rebellion continue to espouse a universalist aim of salvaging the planet from environmental devastation and climate change. But if progressive politics can be said at present to possess an ideational—one might even say idealist—mission, it is, ironically, particularist and conservative. Not conservative in the political sense, but in the original sense, according to Webster’s: “to keep in a safe or sound state.”
The operative verb here is “to keep.” To keep safe is only meaningful if that safety, having once been achieved, is now presumed threatened. This is not the Wilsonian “make safe.” What was once a predominantly reformist drive in progressivism, one that looked forward to a better future, has become increasingly preservationist in character, attempting to halt or restrain a historical trajectory that seems to flail about destructively, like a “wild animal,” as Hegel put it.
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Recent protest movements in Europe and elsewhere have exemplified this trend, perhaps most prominently the series of demonstrations that began in and around Istanbul’s Gezi Park in 2013. The protesters represented a broad range of interests and political inclinations, from environmentalists and gay rights activists to secular nationalists, religious nationalists, and soccer fans. Their shared platform consisted of the preservation of the small park adjacent to central Taksim Square. Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s government planned to raze the park to construct a shopping mall in its place. “Gezi Park must stay as a park” was the primary demand of the Gezi Solidarity movement. All the other agreed-upon demands concerned the government’s actions to prevent the demonstrations themselves (police brutality, tear gas, arrests, a ban on protests). In effect, there was a single shared preservationist goal.
Even before Gezi, similar efforts were underway elsewhere in Europe. In Croatia, the youth organization Pravo na grad (Right to the City) protested the construction of a shopping mall and garage on Cvjetni Trg, a historic square in Zagreb, from 2006 to 2011. The group now says it specializes in “activism against the devastation of public space.” There is a similar group in Serbia called Ne da(vi)mo Beograd (We will not surrender Belgrade), whose name suggests the city is under siege. Especially telling are the internal parentheses, which encompass both the present and future tense, as in an ongoing, perpetual—or in the grammatical sense, imperfective—preservationist action.
One is tempted to see some resurrection of the notion of perpetual revolution in these movements, but rather than having an expansionist, universalizing, and transformative impulse, they display a halting, particular, preservative tendency. This is more akin to Edmund Burke’s calls in Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), a founding document of conservatism, for “a healthy halt to all precipitate decisions” to “prevent the sore evil of harsh, crude, unqualified reformations” by means of “a tedious, moderate, but practical resistance.” The emphasis of Ne da(vi)mo Beograd is similarly on patience and careful planning “to secure long-term change of our society, rather than short-term benefit.” One of the slogans printed on the T-shirts of Pravo na grad activists reads “strpljen / spašen” (patient / saved), a far cry from the emboldened progressivism of early-twentieth-century Serbian Social Democrats, who regularly declared themselves “opponents of the status quo.”
The Bulgarian political scientist Ivan Krastev wrote after Gezi, “The protests have not marked the return of revolution . . . they actually serve to forestall revolution by keeping its promise of a radically different future at an unbridgeable distance.” Yet to suggest these movements are categorically allergic to alternative futures would be wide of the mark. Some of them have birthed political campaigns with broader reform programs, and most have long outlived their original raisons d’être. Even a spoof party like Hungary’s Two-Tailed Dog has moved beyond calls for free beer and more sunshine to spawn a registered political party that concerns itself as much with civic action as with satire.
What these movements have in common is attempting not so much to alter the shape of the present world as to predict or anticipate the shape of future political constellations. Their simple, particular, and preservationist agendas make it possible to attract a broad spectrum of otherwise incompatible interests. They show an awareness that the political spectrum as it once was, along with all the terms and symbols by which it could be plotted (human rights, memory politics, technocratic romanticism, fiscal conservatism, family values, identity politics), no longer exists, or exists only in a ghostly form. Something new is coming. Such efforts—like the forces of Orbánism, Putinism, and Trumpism that they oppose—can be viewed as attempts to give shape to a post–Cold War political future that is still very much in the making.
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One of the more fascinating manifestations
of the preservationist tendency can be found in
a Spanish Netflix series,
El Ministerio del Tiempo (The Ministry of Time), which debuted in
2015. History is especially fraught in Spain given
the resurgence of memory around the Spanish
Civil War, most recently in October 2019, when
the Socialist government ordered the exhumation
of the late nationalist dictator Francisco Franco
from a grave site designated for victims of the
Civil War. The show imagines a government
ministry that has found a way to travel through time.
Yet the Ministry of
Time uses the secret portal not
to change the past but to make sure that
particular events—even very difficult and painful ones—stay
happened.
In a recent review of the series, historian Christopher Szabla wonders: “why is the past we have experienced up to the present point, with its private miseries and public genocides, invasions, and plagues, worth preserving, and with it our far-from-perfect present?” The answer, he believes, which may apply more generally to the preservationist drive in the interest of particular persons and places, is that, for better or worse, it is “our” past. “[T]he past must be preserved both to underscore the triumphs it has led to and the ongoing problems and lost possibilities that point toward revision.”
In this way, what might be called the new “progressive conservatism” reveals some proprietary sentiment of the sort otherwise typical of nationalists, a poignant particularism that is also a signal of despair and an attempt at consecration. As such, it recalls a passage from Walter Benjamin’s essay “On the Concept of History,” written during World War II: “The only historian capable of fanning the spark of hope in the past is the one who is firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he is victorious.”
Part of this drive for preservation is in line with the general trend away from universalist thinking and toward hyper-subjectivity. Universalism has taken repeated and perhaps fatal blows, not least from left-of-center critics who might once have been its staunchest defenders. The crimes of colonialism, Stalinism, and a range of other horrific “-isms” have been traced back to Enlightenment universalism. There have also been increasingly fervent critiques of the notion of human rights as being destructive of what it purports to protect.
Little wonder that the particularized subject yields a particularized object to be saved, and that the reasons are typically either personal or local: one saves not out of idealism or ideology or a sense of duty, but out of love. The thing to be saved is simply: My beloved. Our park. Our history. Our university. The preservationist impulse thus has an immediate and visceral quality. Perhaps it is also deeply necessary, or at least unavoidable, as a counterbalance to the increasingly dominant alternative of unapologetic cruelty, cynicism, whataboutism, and Schadenfreude—a right-wing politics that is anything but “conservative,” delighting in the demise of particular others and the destruction of the world as it is, heedless even of its own preservation.
But beyond the seeming impossibility of moving forward by keeping things as they are, the particularist preservationist impulse is steeped in other paradoxes as well. One is the question of scale in political thought. What might be lost if the scope of our thinking is limited to what is near and dear to us? When viewed from the level of the entire Star Wars saga, Rose’s rescue gesture in The Last Jedi appears in a different light, resembling the sort of Faustian, particularist sentiment that motivated the young Jedi knight Anakin to become the evil Darth Vader in a misguided attempt to save his pregnant wife. In a tragic irony, Anakin’s turn to the Dark Side precipitates rather than prevents her death. French philosopher and historian René Girard called this “the terrible paradox of human desires”: they “can never be reconciled in the preservation of their object but only through its destruction.”
A second paradox relates to walls and fences, which are half-implied in any particularist preservationist drive. According to an oft-quoted statistic, there were fifteen border walls in the world before 1989, and now there are over seventy. The new right erects fences and walls ostensibly to “protect” what is inside from whatever is on the outside. In Hungary, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán built a fence along the southern border to prevent Middle Eastern refugees and migrants from “contaminating” Hungarian society.
There is a liberal and leftist-progressive variant of this tendency, especially in thinking on ecology and climate change. The journalist Andrea Appleton has called it “curation conservation.” She writes, “Many of us desperately want to preserve the thing we call nature or wilderness,” and this entails erecting “predator-proof fences” to create “a demonstration plot of what once was.” But the plot is inadequate to the purpose, because the endangered species symbolizes “the uncontained riot of the natural world.” The true object of the wish to salvage is a cosmos rather than a particular creature, a symbolic outside.
There is something at once moving and grotesque about seeing singed koalas in the back of a car, or thirsty kangaroos drinking out of baby bottles in a bedroom. They are safe, but they are no longer wild. The particular quality about them that was deemed worthy of protection is one of the first casualties of their individual salvation. For this reason, the earliest religions sacralized a species or variety, rather than an individual: “It is not such and such kangaroo or crow but the kangaroo or the crow in general,” wrote the French sociologist Émile Durkheim in 1912. If we focus on the specific kangaroo, what are we to do when we fail to save it?
In his 1945 essay “The War Has Taken Place,” French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty wondered how to think about particular human losses. “We claim that [history] must not be forgotten,” he wrote,
[Yet] there will come a moment when what we wish to preserve of the friends who were tortured and shot is not our last image of them . . . but a timeless memory in which the things they did mingle with what they might have done, given the direction of their lives. We have not of course gotten to this point, but . . . should we not go beyond our feelings to find what they may contain of durable truth?
