Historical Contingency: Antidote to Status-Based Thought and Action

In any case, historical contingency as an attitudinal quality is not something abstract, it is applied humility.

The higher the levels of inequality, the wider the gaps between income levels, the broader the subjective horizons of possibility, the lesser the State supports projects of social equity, the more it abdicates responsibility for material quality of life improvements, the more vital status becomes a seemingly rational social category, a goal to be pursued over any other. Deeply unequal societies provoke primal anti-civilizational instincts in people, and although it is the job of the economists to collate the data on this point, it is intuitively true that the widening spectrum of wealth, power, and capital, which we can describe here, rather arbitrarily, as an aggregate through the category of status, registers in people a desire to hoard any and all matter of value. In resource scarce countries, societies, and communities, this hoarding further deracinates the potential for civil society. Once enough status is accumulated, it is easily reproduced, barring an exceptional abuse of common-sense in progeny; economic, social, political, and intellectual capital is transferred through law, educational institutes, bureaucracy, and structures of governments. This is a broadly true axiom, but absurdly so in a majority of Muslim societies and even in certain Other hyper-financial states that dominate the global circuits of wealth, power, and prestige.

There are policy solutions and interventions that the relevant people have to think about, but on the individual level, the most potent medication for curing an attachment to status in this corroding sense is to recognize the rather simple fact of historical contingency. The religious argument is also there, that God provides to whom He wills, but for those who are not inclined towards such a line of thought, and covet a more material explanation, then a basic study of contingency in historical movement is enough to destruct the edifice of status as a category; a singular displacement of any variable in one’s life can have the cascading effect of stripping one of their perceived status. While the discourse now in Silicon Valley has now begun fixating on a self-flagellating concept of a permanent underclass, this is primarily a Western worry, those who know other societies already acknowledge the entrenched nature of several permanent underclasses, with next to zero ability to have any elastic relationship to material success.

In any case, historical contingency as an attitudinal quality is not something abstract, it is applied humility. It must be noted that humility as a religious concept is rather abused in certain ways, whether it be with the exploitative feudal praising God after devastating his serfs, or seemingly, but not in reality, a more benign hidden arrogance concomitant with an entitlement one may have towards the perceived accumulation of worldly goods as a signifier for divine grace.

Now, proper humility must account for and acknowledge arrogance as a primal marker of virtuous existence, to reject it is cowardly and paradoxically properly Arrogant. This is because virtuous arrogance is historically contingent, a good of the now, but Arrogance is an eternal vice. It is also necessary to shame pietistic humility in this brilliant age of Arrogance; now, the point that is to me made here is not that pietistic humility has lost its innate virtue, but rather its expression was suited to the age of Piety, where Arrogance, not arrogance, was the key corrupter of souls. Now, we live in new world-making times, where the Bermanian solids have long melted into air, and where a new class of technocrats strive to re-construct the category of status in their image: they are the Arrogant, but the arrogant, with this applied humility we speak of, are the vanguard of life, it is an interminable virtue, while Arrogance is a pyrrhic cascade into relativistic status games, mimetic and petty. The idols of the now are not mythical symbols of an external ideological philosophy that has taken root in some unitary Muslim mind, rather it is the expression of the violent discharge of the reaction between a a very material hyper-financialized world and its attendant mental dispositions.

Now, with the necessary arcana exhausted in its utility, it is prudent to let Augustine have the final word on this, and before I do, perhaps, it is critical to think why Muslim society has developed a fetish for civilization purity beyond the now rather stale explanation of it being a response to coloniality, which is true, but insufficient now and here. I do not accept the rejoinder that the “tradition” already has enough substance to not need “external” data points. In fact, if one may be bold and brave, a proper thinker would categorize this line of argument as particularly regressive and almost anti-God. But never-mind, that seems to be too great an ask when an adolescent minded culture would not even recognize Ghazali or Ibn Sina.

Anyway, I would not be disinclined to have the Augustine as a core agent of any secondary humanities curriculum in the Muslim context, which, by the way, lies in utter ruin, so does the tertiary, for that matter. There is no hope until the teaching profession is revived, it cannot remain the purview of snobbish elderly women of the richer schools or the financially emaciated intellectual laborers of the less privileged, mostly public schools. In fact, it may very well be so that the ethical core of Christianity, its utter devotion to humility, be able to rise again in the East, perhaps with a little help from the order of the Muhammadan ﷺ mystics, but we shall wait and see, we the materialists.

I am also not entirely against a radical resuscitation of a proper slave morality that utilizes the original contextual substance of the past without needing to be a slave to it; so, in practice, if we integrate the substrate of meekness into the substrate of the modern critique of such a morality, we may yet discover some light.

Augustine says to young Dioscorus:

That first way, however, is humility; the second way is humility, and the third way is humility, and as often as you ask, I would say this. It is not that there are no other Commandments that should be mentioned, but unless humility precedes and accompanies and follows upon all our good actions and is set before us to gaze upon, set alongside for us to cling to, and set over us to crush us down, pride tears the whole benefit from our hand when we rejoice over some good deed. We must fear the other vices in sinful actions, but pride even in good deeds. Otherwise, we will lose, because of the desire for praise, those things that were done in a praiseworthy manner. And so, when that most distinguished orator was asked what he thought one ought first of all to observe in the rules of eloquence, he is said to have answered, “Delivery.” And when he was asked what came second, he said again, “Delivery.” And asked what came third, he said only, “Delivery.” So too, if you ask—and as often as you ask—about the rules of the Christian religion, I would answer only, “Humility,” even if necessity would perhaps force me to say something else.¹

I lied; it is not possible to conclude without letting the Dionysian jester, whose specter is itching to hammer away at our text, have a word too. The slave morality we speak of here is not the one he lit on fire; the one he had rightfully dismantled shall remain in ruin. Rather, it is another concept of his, that of modesty, that we may invoke to save us from the prison construed through the economies of status. At a time of established turmoil, he notes, with a distrust of metaphysics and grand civilizational claims:

All philosophers have the common failing of starting out from man as he is now and thinking they can reach their goal through an analysis of him. They involuntarily think of ‘man’ as an aeterna veritas as something that remains constant in the midst of all flux, as a sure measure of things. Everything the philosopher has declared about man is, however, at bottom no more than a testimony as to the man of a very limited period of time…but every­ thing has become: there are no eternal facts, just as there are no absolute truths. Consequently what is needed from now on is historical philosophiz­ing, and with it the virtue of modesty.²

For our purpose, what he rightly underlines is primarily the correct attitude towards discovering the nature of the times, through a careful, almost philologically precise method, to recognize that our conceptions, the domain of status here, has to ruptured here and now, in the moment, almost like one has to touch it, feel it, what Proust, for something entirely else, described as:

Thus it can be only after one has recognized, not without having had to feel one’s way, the optical illusions of one’s first impression that one can arrive at an exact knowledge of another person, supposing such knowledge to be ever possible.³

It is then this alchemical collision between humility and modesty, with a meek arrogance, both not mutually exclusive, that we rely upon for redemption from the crimes of seeking what ought not be sought, and in doing, inducing the widespread decay of man and society.

1. Augustine and John E. Rotelle, The Works of Saint Augustine: A Translation For The 21st Century, trans. Edmund Hill, with Augustinian Heritage Institute (New City Press, 1990), 116-117.

2. Friedrich Nietzsche et al., Human, All Too Human, 13. print, ed. Richard Schacht, Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy (Cambridge Univ. Press, 2009), 12-13.

3. Marcel Proust, Within a Budding Grove, trans. C.K. Scott Moncrieff (Planet eBook).