One of the patterns I note when reading books is that Marxist writers have a distinct and lamentable habit of referring to the contemporary period as the late age of things that have not yet ended.  For example, a Marxist will exercise his false prophetic spirit and label the contemporary age as the late age of print.  A Marxist writer of opinion/editorial material will refer to the contemporary age as the late age of Capitalism as if his or her preferred economic system of some form of state socialism will rise out of the defunct age to take its place.  Yet all such determinations of late age depend on knowing or at least having confidence in one’s ability to predict the lifespan of institutions and cultures and habits.  How can we do so with confidence?  We can look back on history and note when particular ages of civilizations were done, and assign periods with confidence looking retrospectively with foreknowledge of how things would turn out.  So we can say with confidence that the period after the Crusades was the late Middle Ages, as it was approaching the Renaissance, even though people at the time would have just been living their lives.

How can we do so with confidence looking forward?  We cannot trust in the prophetic skills of Marxist interpreters of history.  These are the same people whose namesake thought that the capitalism of his day and age would lead to such a harsh existence that capitalist societies would be overthrown by workers, something that never happened as societies, quite sensibly, ensured a decent standard of living for their ordinary population in order to increase the legitimacy of their constitutional regimes.  These are the same people who thought that the Soviet Union was more powerful than the United States in the dark days of the 1970’s when a sense of malaise seemed to exist in the United States, before the revival of American and British fortunes under able leadership by Reagan and Thatcher, respectively, and when Soviet recrudescence revealed itself for the world to see in defeats in Vietnam (against China) and Afghanistan (against various Islamist thugs) before spectacularly falling apart and leading to the breakup of the Soviet Empire.  These people did not repent of their folly and error at that point, and seem convinced that they are on the right side of history and that their victory is historically inevitable despite the fact that every period of socialist rule has been disastrous for the country involved and its people.

There are several responses we can take to this.  The most obvious is to reject that Marxist thinkers have any insight into determining what the late age of anything is.  When one hears such a term being used of something still in existence, not only can one figure that the speaker is allied with Marxist thinking, but that they do not know what they are talking about on general grounds of Marxist incompetence as well as the fact that determining the late age of anything requires some sort of foreknowledge.  We would do well to be skeptical in general of claims of prophetic insight from others.  While I have discussed elsewhere the biblical tests for a genuine prophet [1], it is worth summarizing the general points here, and that is that a legitimate prophet will call for unpopular repentance from rampant social sins to avoid the eventual certainty of God’s judgment and that the prophecies a godly prophet will come to pass unless there is a societal repentance that makes such judgment unnecessary (see, for example, Micah and Jonah).  If someone has a track record of false prophets, as is the case with would-be Marxist oracles, and calls for revolutionary and immoral social change rather than godly repentance, that person is a false prophet and deserves to be treated accordingly.  Biblical punishment for false prophets would be an appropriate response to such attempts at oracular political philosophy.

We are therefore faced with a task, and that is recognizing and discounting the prophetic spirit in politics.  There are a great many people who think that they are on the right side of history and that there are certain things that are destined to happen, be it particular forms of environmental collapse or the societal rise and acceptance and victory of particular habits of behavior or particular views.  Such confidence in eventual victory inspires such people to be arrogant and abusive and tyrannical towards others and this confidence has not been harmed by their poor past record of predicting the future or the response that others or that reality has to their own worldviews and the consequences thereof.  Yet such confidence is unwarranted, both by the track record of such prophetic utterances as well as by the misguided worldview that motivates such people.  We can pity such deluded people who believe that various trendy leftist causes and worldviews are historically inevitable phenomena, and view their misguided misinterpretations of the past, present, and future with the compassion that such delusions deserve.  Let us not, though, be discouraged or adopt their own fallacious reasoning for ourselves.

[1] Namely:

The Two Tests Of Godly Prophets