LITMIR.BIZ

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produced by transitory and often unhappy circumstances, upon which the meticulous scholar can now perform distinctively modern disciplinary operations.

      Whatever their walks of life, the advocates of this immanent, expansive becoming are at home in universities. Their sense of self is entwined with them, and the order of merit and prestige attending them. Befitting their professional status, an appropriate zeal for their own advancement and that of their allies is suitable, even praiseworthy. To pay dearly in order to live honestly in a flawed world is regrettably still necessary elsewhere; but through the expansion of perpetually negotiable becoming to which they have contributed as scholars and students, there is no longer a tension between being honored by one’s contemporaries and telling the truth without reserve. To claim otherwise is to open the way for archaic economies of sacrifice, in which the desire to sacrifice for truth often produces the oppositions that themselves create the need for and legitimacy of sacrifice. It is thought better to examine that dangerous economy from a secure scholarly distance, or to avoid it entirely.

      Among these judgments often rests the assumption that most of the longstanding particular forms of human conviction, belief, and allegiance that mediate between individual persons and universal humanity—in particular, notions of communal continuity, of peoples, and perhaps above all of religious faith—should be allowed to dissolve inexorably, consumed by the irresistible velocity of media and scholarship, and the general liquefaction of identities in the flux of increasingly self-conscious becoming.

      It is likely, and desirable—a kind of immanent justice—that these older forms of being human will be altogether absorbed in that continuous, perpetually contemporary negotiation and exchange, issuing in a cumulative equanimity of perspective set loose from all particular fictions, all arbitrarily inherited and given commitments. For the daring, this will ultimately include the great given of being human. Human being may only be a transitional moment in becoming’s perpetual advance. Perhaps most important, a straightforwardly two-dimensional linear time, moving neatly from past to present to future, will vindicate this immanent and ultimately universal becoming.

      Such was the intellectual world Péguy saw coming to be in early twentieth-century Paris.

      Alongside it a faction comes to be, this one self-consciously particularist, populated by the avowed enemies of expanding becoming. Furthermore, in a truly universal humanity, universal rights, universal hopes, and perhaps above all the work of universal justice, these enemies see only the triumph of the expansive immanence they oppose. To block its triumph is their foremost purpose and end.

      For the advocates of this particularist order, both immanent becoming and the universally human are alleged to be the instrument of an inexorable exsanguination, set against vital and positive action, that cuts itself off from the chthonic power inhering in the limiting forms of particular peoples, a particular traditional culture, in traditional forms of order and prejudice that, in their account, themselves give ultimate limiting coherence, purpose, and above all strength to being human. They have an idolatrous awe for this strength, often serving as self-appointed champions of some portion of the culture identified as its true and ultimate origin, its putative “heartland.” This heartland is set in contrast to modern urban life, and perhaps especially the universities beloved by their adversaries; for self-conscious and resentful particularists, the world of learning is simply a base for an opposing ideology.

      The partisans of this order often claim to love the past, but most reliably express not a love or gratitude for its givenness; rather, they give vent to an inexhaustible anger over its present alteration, whether or not those alterations are just. Their rhetoric abounds in invective. To strip their opponents of respect is a task to which they warm with alacrity—even as they express a longing for the forms of mutuality, respect, and dignity that the new order of perpetual negotiation sweeps away. For all that, they often present the past they claim to love only in evocative outline; at intervals it appears as the necessary MacGuffin for the expression of antagonisms, hastening the way to an allegedly clarifying agon.

      These wrathful particularists often intimate a loyalty to older notions of transcendence—including religious faith and its avowal of abiding truths—but they conceive of that which transcends time only as an arrested immanence. They often present an amalgamated past as a unity, the final and definitive form for flourishing for themselves and their community, in which a comprehensive fulfillment was possible, and which now must be reinserted mechanically into the present, without creativity or surprise. Within their arrested immanence, they express contempt for their learned adversaries but also hope—once more the captives of their opponents—that “science” will confirm their particularism and its prejudices.

      The champions of willful particularism show themselves ready and often eager for collective sacrifice—often for others in their self-identified community—in relation to enemies. Yet they stand in unmistakable disaccord with many of the exalted truths they profess to defend and proclaim worthy of sacrifice. In its most conceptually assertive and self-aware forms, the sacrifice particularists are most eager to make is a sacrifice of truth. They assert that faith should be upheld, though they do not believe it true,¹ that long-standing prejudices and brutal forms of scapegoating should be affirmed regardless of the facts of the case, that illusions are more compatible with human and historical drama and collective power than truth.

      Péguy opposed both an immanent becoming and the particularist, arrested immanence that accompanied it in the early twentieth century. The partisans of each group were not the same, and they required different forms of opposition. For the partisans of “the intellectual party”—whatever their politics—that opposition took the form of written argument.

      To oppose the most enraged and violent anti-universalists, however, would require direct defensive action in the streets as well as words, as in the defense of Alfred Dreyfus—a Jewish officer in the French Army falsely accused of treason—during the Dreyfus affair of the 1890s and early 1900s, in which Dreyfus and other French Jews were subject to an increasingly vicious and pervasive anti-Semitism.

      It was an integral part of Péguy’s work to see both ways of being modern as they were; to see, at various speeds and levels and in different ways, the profound and consuming inhumanity that subsisted in both immanent, inexorable becoming and reactionary particularism.

      Reactionaries tended to cohere enthusiastically around immediate threats to both the dignity and the physical safety of other human beings, especially those belonging to small and vulnerable groups, and to find a malicious glee in their suffering and degradation.

      The other side was solicitous of the physical safety of persons but, in Péguy’s account, sought no less to put an eventual end to human dignity, and with it to the notion of human being as something distinct from material mechanisms, or units of social function, or the comprehensive products of impersonal historical processes. This end would be directed not only at accounts of the soul—religious or secular, aesthetic or moral—but also often to the very possibility of human freedom as something other than an increasingly complete repudiation of the past and of all not subject to becoming. (The advocates of immanent becoming were decidedly chary about arguments advancing free will or the possibility of substantive human creativity.) They pursued their own project with a sweaty partisan zeal that made its way under an amusingly ill-fitting carapace of judicious calm and meticulous neutrality of method.

      Péguy would insist upon another way—related differently to the past, present, and future alike—in which the particular and the universal, being and becoming, were equally indispensable to human flourishing. He insisted further that the political obsessions of both continuously becoming immanence and arrested immanence were most important as a visible sign that life-giving dimensions of human experience were suffering from neglect and an intentionally cultivated ignorance, often produced by a severe misunderstanding of time.

      For Péguy, neither of these forms of culture and politics could serve to substitute for a free, continuous, and living relation of diverse pasts with the present and diverse futures, and ultimately to the transcendence of linear time in eternity, prompted by love and sustained by lucid hope. For him, those truths that move at once within and beyond time participate imperfectly in the fullness of any historical moment, because

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