Just Say Yes! to History

Participate joyfully in the sorrows of the world. We cannot cure the world of sorrows, but we can choose to live in joy. --Joseph Campbell

So, is history convergent or divergent? In the realm of ideas, a problem is considered convergent if a universal solution to it can be discovered. For example, even if Einstein hadn't gotten there first, it is presumed that someone would have eventually discovered the equivalence of mass and energy. Or if Gene Mauch hadn't come up with the "double switch," some other baseball manager would have. A problem is thought to be divergent when it appears to have no single solution, but when different investigators are led down different paths toward differing conclusions, for example, questions of the most effective way to invest your money, the purpose of life, or the best strategy for arguing with a moonbat.

Now, the vast majority of scholars would undoubtedly consider the problem of history to be a divergent one, with no agreement -- and no possibility of agreement -- as to its ultimate nature: what it is, what is its purpose, where it is headed, etc. Therefore, a priori, history can have no meaning outside the individual historian’s mind. That is, if history doesn't refer to something outside itself, it is ultimately without meaning or purpose, truly the proverbial "tale told by a tenured idiot, full of sound and fury but signifying a nice paycheck.” While there can be limited purposes within history, there is no transcendent meaning to any of these endeavors, any more than there can be transcendent meaning to your individual goals and pursuits. It's all ultimately pointless.

Shortly after the cold war, the neo-Hegelian scholar Francis Fukuyama published his controversial book The End of History and The Last Man. It's been quite a while, but when I read the book, I never took it to mean that, with the end of the Cold War, history had somehow come to a literal end, as if nothing important would happen. Rather, his central point was that history was converging upon liberty, democracy, free markets, and individual rights, because societies that embodied these ideals were best able to fulfill human potential and satisfy mankind's deepest needs. Based upon a kind of natural selection applied to collectivities, countries would increasingly come to resemble one another, because there are more and less objectively effective ways of organizing society and meeting human needs.

I think the biggest knock on Fukuyama is that he underestimated -- to say the least -- the power of religion and culture to shape the human mind. And even more importantly, being a rationalist, he failed to appreciate the unconscious and irrational element in both of these realms. In short, he looked at culture as a basically rational enterprise instead of a deeply irrational (or arational or transrational) one. If even a relatively sane society such as the United States is prone to mass delusions, collective hysteria, and group fantasies, it is scarcely possible for us to imagine what it must be like to be an average citizen of Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, or Berkeley.

And in pointing out that Fukuyama underestimated the power of culture, it's just another way of saying that he overlooked the realm of the vertical, in both its lower and upper aspects. The odd thing about earthlings is that they are attached to their culture, even -- or especially -- if the culture doesn't seem to work. Superficially this makes no sense, but it is exactly analogous to the manner in which a neurotic person is more attached to his neurosis than a "normal" person is to his sanity.

This is for complex reasons related to the manner in which mind parasites function. For a full explanation, I'd have to take a lengthy detour into developmental psychoanalysis, but the main idea is that it is unnecessary for the developing mind to internalize the good, only the bad. The securely attached child is more adventurous, spontaneous, and free, whereas the insecure child becomes much more attached to the very source of his insecurity. You've probably heard the cliche that bereavement is generally much more complicated when the relationship was a negative or ambivalent one, and this is the reason why. In general, pathological relationships are kept in place by a host of unconscious tentacles with hidden agendas, reaching back and forth, holding the couple together with what might be called (-p), or negative passion.

You could say that pathological cultures are essentially exercises in collective (-p). I mean, if you can bypass your sheer horror for the moment, just consider this story from LGF, 'Honor Killing' Epidemic in Britain:

"Up to 17,000 women in Britain are being subjected to 'honour' related violence, including murder, every year, according to police chiefs.... And official figures on forced marriages are the tip of the iceberg, says the Association of Chief Police Officers. It warns that the number of girls falling victim to forced marriages, kidnappings, sexual assaults, beatings and even murder by relatives intent on upholding the 'honour' of their family is up to 35 times higher than official figures suggest.

"The crisis, with children as young as 11 having been sent abroad to be married, has prompted the Foreign and Commonwealth Office to call on British consular staff in Bangladesh, India and Pakistan to take more action to identify and help British citizens believed to be the victims of forced marriages in recent years."

The crisis has also also prompted the Archbishop of Canterbury to welcome the imposition of sharia law in Britain. At least the (mostly) homosexual ephebophile Catholic priests only harmed individuals. This loon wants to normalize abuse on a mass scale.

At any rate, Fukuyama was essentially updating the classical liberal ideal of history, or what Coons call darwhiggian evolution. It may be contrasted with the post-modern badeal of historical meaninglessness, which in turn, is actually similar to primitive cosmologies, which either view the cosmos as a cyclical and unprogressive pattern of “eternal return” or as a degenerate process of departure and increasing distance from an idyllic past. Only with the Hebrew approach to history did mankind begin to discern a vector or direction in history, and with it, a sense of history’s purpose. That is, for the first time, history was seen as trying to get somewhere, and was looked upon as somehow interacting with sOmething on a “vertical” plane -- a trans-subjective force which both intervened in history and drew human beings toward it.

Later, Christianity would develop an explicitly logoistic theory of history, embodying the belief in a literal descent of this vertical power into the stream of horizontal time, so as to forge a concrete link between the vertical and horizontal -- between spirit and flesh, time and eternity, O and (•). To say that "God became man" or "Word became flesh" is just another way of saying that the vertical -- the Absolute, timeless ground, outside time and anterior to manifestation -- poured itself into material form and chronological time -- not just in a single human being, but in the whole upward "flow" of humanity.

Only humans can serve as a bridge between the higher and lower planes that are manifest in the outward process of history. Indeed, this is our vocation and purpose: to nurture and grow the seed of eternity within the womb of time. (This is not dissimilar to the Jewish concept ofTikkun -- of participating in the repair and completion of God's creation.)

To contemporary observers, the life of Jesus, or of the Hebrew prophets, was invisible. This is highly instructive. That is, the most important and influential events in human history were completely undetected and overlooked by contemporary sophisticates. Rather, they were noticed only by a handful of provincial rubes who "saw" and "heard," not with their eyes and ears, but in a trans-cerebral, intuitive manner.

What great world-historical events are invisible to the jaded elites of the present? What great vertical energies are entering the world today, undetected by a spiritually oblivious mainstream media, so hypnotized by the spectacle of time and blind to the eternal? The MSM, in thrall to the tyranny of the momentary, doesn't just promote this or that stupid idea. Rather, being that "the medium is the message," its central message is always the same -- that the Aion is broken into a million little disconnected fragments; that the world is deeply bizarre, insane, and perversely anti-human; and yet, at the same time, as trivial and fleeting as the speed of a thumb on the remote control.

The world is always ending, but perpetually being reborn. If that weren't true, mankind would never have found the exit out of its closed circle of material and instinctual existence. I am reminded of a passage from Joseph Campbell's Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake:

"The Wake, in its lowest estimate, is a huge time capsule, a complete and permanent record of our age. If our society should go smash tomorrow (which Joyce implies, it may) one could find all of the pieces, together with the forces that broke them, in Finnegans Wake. The book is a kind of terminal moraine in which lie buried all the myths, programs, slogans, hopes, prayers, tools, educational theories, and theological bric-a-brac of the past millennium. And here, too, will be found the love that reanimates the debris. Joyce's moraine is not the brickdust but humus.... Through notes that finally become tuneable to our ears, we hear Joyce uttering his resilient, all-enjoying, all animating Yes, the Yes of things yet to come, a Yes from beyond every zone of disillusionment, such as few have had the heart to utter."

For somewhere hovering above the insanity of history is

The whole Truth. Nothing but the Truth. So ham, me God. We'll meet again. Up ahead, 'round the bend. The circle unbroken, by and by. A Divine Child, a godsend, a touch of infanity, a bloomin' Yes. --The Book of Petey