"Nobody seriously believes in the social philosophies of the immediate past"
About this Quote
Read’s line has the cool sting of an obituary delivered at a dinner party: not a passionate denunciation, but a calm pronouncement that yesterday’s certainties are already dead on arrival. The key word is “seriously.” He’s not claiming people stop repeating old slogans; he’s arguing they stop inhabiting them. Belief, in his framing, isn’t a library of inherited ideas but a living practice. Once a “social philosophy” becomes the immediate past, it turns into museum text: quoted, taught, maybe even weaponized, but no longer trusted as a guide for the present’s mess.
The subtext is a critique of how modern societies metabolize ideology. We don’t abandon systems because we’ve reasoned our way to something better; we abandon them because the world changes faster than our explanations do. After World War I and II, the “immediate past” wasn’t quaint Victorian moralism so much as whole political faiths - imperial progress narratives, laissez-faire complacency, even the promised rationality of bureaucratic modernity - collapsing under historical stress. Read, a poet and an anarchist-leaning critic of industrial civilization, is sniffing out the pattern: each generation performs reverence for what came before while privately shopping for replacements.
There’s also a quiet jab at nostalgia as a social pose. “Nobody seriously believes” implies plenty of people pretend to, because old philosophies are useful as identity badges or tools of authority. Read’s sentence works because it names the hypocrisy without moralizing: a tight, almost clinical observation that makes “tradition” sound like a costume department, not a conviction.
The subtext is a critique of how modern societies metabolize ideology. We don’t abandon systems because we’ve reasoned our way to something better; we abandon them because the world changes faster than our explanations do. After World War I and II, the “immediate past” wasn’t quaint Victorian moralism so much as whole political faiths - imperial progress narratives, laissez-faire complacency, even the promised rationality of bureaucratic modernity - collapsing under historical stress. Read, a poet and an anarchist-leaning critic of industrial civilization, is sniffing out the pattern: each generation performs reverence for what came before while privately shopping for replacements.
There’s also a quiet jab at nostalgia as a social pose. “Nobody seriously believes” implies plenty of people pretend to, because old philosophies are useful as identity badges or tools of authority. Read’s sentence works because it names the hypocrisy without moralizing: a tight, almost clinical observation that makes “tradition” sound like a costume department, not a conviction.
Quote Details
| Topic | Wisdom |
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