patience

//"Anarchists have to be as patient as slugs."// — slogan on a silkscreened patch seen for sale at the New York City Anarchist Bookfair, April 2009

Patience is commonly regarded as a virtue, and it has particular significance for developing an anarchist(ic) approach to time.

In Aristotelian terms, we might wish to think of patience as being the virtuous 'golden mean' between the opposite vices of haste and resignation. Patience, therefore, requires and implies a degree of hope.

Very similarly to the discussion of the virtue of courage (as opposed to both cowardice and recklessness), Errico Malatesta's invocation of "revolutionary haste" would be a case against cowardice and resignation rather than an endorsement of haste in a pejorative sense: "...we must confess our preference for those who err on the side of haste as opposed to those who always play a waiting game and let the best opportunities slip through their fingers for they, through fear of picking a green fruit then let the whole crop go rotten!"

Of course, the perennial debates about strategy and tactics will continue to divide anarchists with divergent beliefs about what constitutes haste or recklessness.

At any moment, the question of what can be done, and what ought to be done... is / ought

Herbert Read "as political 'gradualism... more than... extreme Fabianism..."

Todd May on "reform" and "revolution"

While i insist on the utility of an open-ended approach to political change, and wholeheartedly endorse Herbert Read's and George Woodcock's invocations of an anarchistic orientation towards an ideal that remains on a //receding horizon//, i'm nevertheless concerned not to accidentally encourage the perverse tendency towards perennially smug revisionism that looks fondly to the past but sees no different future — the pattern i'm referring to is humorously captured in Leo Rosten's famous quip: "A conservative is one who admires radicals centuries after they're dead."

Just as it is convenient to sympathize with struggles for justice in a distant //place// (a fact that fuelled some anxiety among those with whom i engaged in international human rights observation and training related to the Zapatista movement in Chiapas, Mexico), it is similarly easy to romanticize struggles that took place in a distant //time// (a fact that fuels some self-consciousness of Irish descendants, like me, when looking back on the history of resistance to British Imperialism). Such //distance// facilitates a dubious coziness, regardless of whether the distance is spatial or temporal. Struggles that (threaten to) disrupt routines //here// and //now// are often brushed aside or held at a distance; in our peripheral vision they can represent good intentions for a time that just never quite seems to come.

Anarchist(ic) patience is a relation to the eternally receding horizon of utopia, it is an arguably schizoidal practice of accepting the unattainability of perfection while nevertheless redoubling a struggle toward it. Thus anarchist patience is repulsed by temporizing, by perpetual deferrals and avoidance of change, as it is a precisely opposite relation to futurity: grasping for it, rather than clinging to the transient present...

Such grasping toward futurity may be futile (at least from certain points of view), but this sort of futility is far preferable to the futility of despair, or perverse hope for a static and eternally stable present. However, this grasping towards the receding horizon nevertheless takes seriously the question of what warrants hesitation — just as patience in mountain climbing implies vigilant attention to each choice of handhold in the ascent.

I'm reminded here of one of my favourite quotations and so prompted to further emphasize: the anarchist(ic) orientation to futurity, as i hope to have made clear, must not be confused with a rejection of the perennial wisdom that invites us to "be here now." We might do well to keep in mind the above analogy to rock climbing as we consider the quote. "Cling to the now," James Joyce wrote in //Ulysses//; but the poetic power of the subsequent phrase transforms this from banal advice into a literary landmark, because it is the //now//, he reminds us, "//through which all future plunges to the past."// With those words, Joyce, in my view, offered an anagogic concept time, by defamiliarizing our //experience// of time as succession. And it is this experience of time that Le Guin's character Shevek seeks to transcend with a "general temporal theory" integrating sequency and simultaneity.

see teleology, time