Foregone Conclusions: Against Apocalyptic History

Contraversions: Critical Studies in Jewish Literature, Culture, and Society

by Michael André Bernstein

Michael Andr Bernstein's passionate denunciation of apocalyptic thinking provides a moral, philosophical, and literary challenge to the way most of us make sense of our worlds. In our search for coherence, Bernstein argues, we tend to see our lives as moving toward a predetermined fate. This "foreshadowing" demeans the variety, the richness, and especially the unpredictability of everyday life. Apocalyptic history denies the openness and choice available to its actors. Bernstein chooses the Holocaust as the prime example of our tendency toward foregone conclusions. He argues eloquently against politicians and theologians who depict the Holocaust as foreordained and its victims as somehow implicated in a fate they should have been able to foresee. But his argument ranges wider. From recent biographies of Kafka to the Israeli-P.L.O. peace accords, from campus cultural diversity debates to the Crown Heights riots, Bernstein warns against our passive acceptance of historical or personal victimization. An essential contribution to Holocaust studies, this book is also a lucid call to transform the way we read and write history and the way we make sense of our lives.

Genres: History, Apocalyptic

181 pages, Hardcover

First published October 4, 1994

About the author

Michael André Bernstein was Professor of English and Comparative Literature at UC Berkeley, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a Guggenheim Fellow, and winner of the Koret Israel Prize who made prolific contributions to the field of literary criticism. His novel, Conspirators, was selected as one of the three finalists for the 2004 Reform Jewish Prize for fiction, was named one of the 25 best novels of the year by the Los Angeles Times, and was shortlisted for the 2004 Commonwealth Writers' Prize.

Reviews

[shayen · Rating 5 out of 5]

"History is not an automatic process. Otherwise, why leaders? why parties? why programs? why theoretical struggles?" — Leon Trotsky.

Between necessity and contingency, there's human freedom. This book examines the concept of human freedom and human history in a rich way; one that criticises retrospective historical condescension, one that respects actors of history as being limited in their view of what the future holds, one that offers a view of history moving with the sideshadowing filter, rather than automatic and absolutely determined process (a foregone conclusion)

History comes down to human choice and agency; there exists limits to our choices, and some people have greater numbers of choices on offer, but the thrust of the book forces one to consider the role of agency and decision-making in our own individual lives, and in the movement of history !

[Bill Weaver · Rating 5 out of 5]

Having taken a break from my reading of Thomas Ligotti I decided this would make for a refreshing respite from such existential nihilism and this book does not disappoint. From a number of other sources including my own recent readings and also Walter Benjamin as cited in this book, the prosaics of modern life can be understood as spiritual practice, with real meaning whether or not they vanish into nothingness or are ever communicated to another human being. This reminded me of the book Underground by Murakami about the Aum Shinrikyo Tokyo subway sarin gas attack – one of the former cult members indicated that after all the maniacal practices of Aum he realized that the mundanity of everyday life offers its own enlightenment. Back to Bernstein’s notions about ‘sideshadowing’ as opposed to ‘foreshadowing’ or ‘backshadowing’ – the apocalyptic mode of thinking runs up against contingency in a fashion similar to the theory of Niklas Luhmann, which emphasizes uncertainty and contingency in modern society and communication. I think the two theories here are quite compatible though I don’t think Bernstein encountered any of Luhmann’s writings directly – just my own guess really – despite the similarity in the centrality of contingency. The danger here perhaps is that the sideshadowing of history, the idea that things might have taken a different course despite the overwhelming weight of a catastrophe such as the Great War or the Shoah, could also point in darker directions, as in Philip K. Dick’s Man in the High Castle, positing an Axis victory in World War II as an alternate history or ‘sideshadow’. Is it wrong to think that one wishes for the sideshadows to always be in a positive or optimistic direction in aggregate even if still beset with the horror of such specific historical tragedies? Notwithstanding a discussion of climate change, if life is really only random, despite our narratives to the contrary, then why do things continually seem to move in a direction favorable to human life and human rights at least in aggregate? Luhmann perhaps felt that to expect society to be favorable to human experience was too optimistic, but Bernstein’s observation (or hope?) is well-made that experience, whether communicated or not, still has meaning.

[Tait · Rating 4 out of 5]

Bernstein’s theory offers a way to write about history that does not fall prey to the dangers of “backshadowing” our knowledge of present events onto the past. This allows writers to avoid treating events through the apocalyptic lens of seeming fated or inevitable rather than one of many possibilities that could have occurred, as well as respecting the lives and hopes of the victims of past tragedies without making them culpable for not accurately predicting the future. It would be great to see this theory tested against other historical moments and fictional texts than those Bernstein discusses in his book, especially actual apocalyptic predictions and scenarios.

[Sophia]

It's a good time to (re)read this book...
Also, among other things, a belated palate cleanser after Horn's essay collection

[James · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ideas: the everyday lives of particular people are valuable in themselves, people are (often, usually) perfectly reasonable for not predicting what seems so obvious to people looking back from the future.

I especially liked the very last part, the quote of Amichai about tour guides getting all wrapped up in Roman arches in Jerusalem, when what is really more interesting is the regular people of Jerusalem. Also the note that what we don't repress, necessarily, is talk of violence, but rather talk of the everyday (not sure it's always true, but something to think about).