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Interesting, Spiff, but isn't it a bit narrow to just think of progress as a two-way street, going only forwards and back? I'm thinking here of the bit in Heinlein's Starship Troopers (which you may not have read; I don't know how popular sci-fi fascism treatises are in France) where he describes an "evolutionarily retarded" planet. On this planet, radiation levels were abnormally low compared to Earth, so in the same period of time this planet had only evolved to the point of Jurassic ferns and giant dragonflies or some such, which imported Terran flora and fauna overwhelmed.
No doubt it made perfect sense according to the popular view of evolution in the fifties or whenever Heinlein wrote it, but it's ridiculous in light of everything I've heard about the process. It assumes that evolution is a fixed progression with a given endpoint (or at least a fixed direction), instead of a dynamic, continuous process of lifeforms changing under pressure to meet the changing conditions of their environment. There's more than one way or one path to go along, and sometimes a little "backtracking" is advantageous.
To continue this evolutionary metaphor, I'm told that whales used to be land animals who returned to the sea at an opportune moment--er, epoch. They were successful, needless to say, until human beings came along and developed a hankering for whale oil and/or canned tuna. Lord knows where the poor buggers will go now...anyway, I'm not trying to get into a major argument about communist thought, but isn't the whole concept of being "reactionary" a little problematic that way? Do all communists assume that there's a fixed direction society should, or rather invariably will at one point or another, move in?
No doubt it made perfect sense according to the popular view of evolution in the fifties or whenever Heinlein wrote it, but it's ridiculous in light of everything I've heard about the process. It assumes that evolution is a fixed progression with a given endpoint (or at least a fixed direction), instead of a dynamic, continuous process of lifeforms changing under pressure to meet the changing conditions of their environment. There's more than one way or one path to go along, and sometimes a little "backtracking" is advantageous.
To continue this evolutionary metaphor, I'm told that whales used to be land animals who returned to the sea at an opportune moment--er, epoch. They were successful, needless to say, until human beings came along and developed a hankering for whale oil and/or canned tuna. Lord knows where the poor buggers will go now...anyway, I'm not trying to get into a major argument about communist thought, but isn't the whole concept of being "reactionary" a little problematic that way? Do all communists assume that there's a fixed direction society should, or rather invariably will at one point or another, move in?
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