The Distributive Passions

THE DISTRIBUTIVE PASSIONS:
A TALE OF THE LAST DAYS OF THE FIRST HARMONIAN REVOLUTION

Ascending Wing

A child saw a blue butterfly resting on a blade of grass; the butterfly was benumbed by the north wind. The child picked the blade of grass, and the living flower at the end of it, still benumbed, could not fly away. The child returned, holding up its chance prize. A sunbeam touched the wing of the butterfly, and suddenly, revived and gay, the living blossom flew away towards the light. We all, seekers and workers—we are like the butterfly: our strength is made only of a ray of light; nay, only of the hope of a ray of light. We must, therefore, know how to hope; hope is the force which bears us upward and forward. But it is an illusion! How do we know that? Must we not move a step, for fear that some day the earth will disappear from under our feet? It is not sufficient to look far into the future, or into the past; we must look into ourselves. We must note there the vital forces which demand to be spent; and we must act.

Marc Guyau, A Sketch of Morality Independent of Obligation or Sanction

Editor’s Note
X+1, Era of Harmony

The Axis passed, it is perhaps natural that many of us turn our attention to the past, not merely from nostalgia, but from some sense that the road up to the crest may provide so signposts for the road down. This is a false logic, unquestionably. We would not expect one side of a mountain to too closely resemble the other. One can make too much of Symmetry and Analogy. In the Old Creation, the land was in places sharply divided by ranges of mountains, rising as high above the plains and deserts on either side as the crest of Harmony has risen above the eras of Civilization and Barbarism. These barrier ranges were responsible, together with the more extreme weather patterns of those earlier eras, for extreme divisions in weather and climate, extreme alternations in heat and cold, moisture and aridity. Air masses which passed over deserts without giving the slightest relief might, on crossing the mountains, deliver torrents. The first freezing winds of winter, pushing across the range, might become the last scorching breath of summer, fanning wildfires. We expect no such sudden transitions, but it may yet be that the dry breath of the past may let loose a gentle rain on our future.

We feel that we face a temperate decline. All the more reason that our Butterfly gravitates the intemperate, heroic eras of the past, the desert behind us. Thus the vogue for the deep past—the nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first centuries—the time of the First Harmonian Revolution, from the first discovery of the new science of society to the high tide of Soviet state associationism, and on through the reign of the Free and the era of the False Crown. Even so primitive an age has its heroines and heros, not least those who first put to the practical test the system discovered and the doctrine elaborated by Fourier, only to find it impracticable in so primitive a form. History and Harmony have validated their faith, two allied forces moving together towards that consommation which we still experience in nearly full measure. But the same doctrine tells us that a separation is in the works. History must move on, but Harmony will gradually be left behind.

Even with ages to contemplate this pivotal disconnection, we find ourselves ill prepared to face it—not that those of us alive to day will face it to any great degree in our lifetimes. But it is strange, unprecedented, to feel so blind in some regards, we who have attained sight in every degree, for whom the arrays of radical atoms and aromas present no mystery. It is as if we stood on the mountaintop, but with a view only at the terrain behind, and, worse yet, with the promise of worsening vision as we descend.

So we look back, hoping to in some manner illuminate the future. And we find that, in that direction as well, much is obscure, particularly as we reach so far back. What follows then is no true historical parcours, but rather a Papillon flitting through history, a series of incidents, with, at the centers of its ascending and descending wings, some rather more substantial narratives of a time, like our own, characterized by decline, but, unlike ours, uncharacterized by anything like gentleness.