The Exodus In & Of History

As human beings meander through prehistory and history...

Well, first of all, what can we possibly say of man before taking his history? Recorded history only goes back 5,000 years or so. Prehistory goes back another 3 million years, but human history per se only begins 50-100 years ago, with the speciation event of Homo sapiens sapiens. Of course, our innocent preliterati couldn't have had any conscious awareness of this cosmo-historical event. Nevertheless it was knowable, or we couldn't know it.

Let's say we go back 100,000 years ago. Someone shows us this strange looking beast. What could we say of him aside from the fact that he is badly in need of a bath? Or that he must have escaped from Portland? Only history could reveal his potential -- for both good and ill.

Indeed, history is the revelation of human potential. It isn't something that can be rationally known from within history a la Hegel and his retarded progeny, nor is it a material process a la Marx and his awokened mob of tenured barbarians.

Rather, it is precisely that which reveals itself in the tension between immanence and transcendence. If the Oracle of the Comment Box has taught us nothing else, it is that the human adventure is reality itself becoming luminous for its movement from the ineffable, through the Cosmos, to the ineffable. That is simultaneously the least and most we can say of it.

The point is that, when we examine our history, it is as if we're, say, peering into our own medical, or better, psychiatric, chart. What has the doctor been recording about us over the years, decades, centuries, and millennia? Let's see: likes to create things. Prone to impulsivity & violence. Obsessed with group status. Cannot manage envy. Prefers ideological dreamworlds over reality. Can't stop lying.

It reminds me of something Charles Murray wrote in Human Accomplishment:

We human beings are in many ways a sorry lot, prone to every manner of vanity and error. The human march forward has been filled with wrong turns, backsliding, and horrible crimes.

In the book, he attempts to quantify the great feats of human accomplishment, but it seems that for every achievement there are any humber of equal and opposite monuments to our depravity. He asks, "What can Homo sapiens brag about -- not as individuals, but as a species?":

Military accomplishment is out -- putting "Defeated Hitler" on the human resumé is too much like putting "Beat My Drug Habit" on a personal one.

Government? Please. I've lived in California my whole life, long enough to confirm Genesis 3: if megalomaniacal ideologues with good intentions and unlimited power can ruin California, then they can certainly ruin paradise.

Let's not ramble. Focus. The point -- it seems -- is that history itself is one long "speciation event." And one of the sources of tension in our age is that, for the first time in history, various subspecies are being reintroduced and forced to live cheek-to-jowl, which prompts all sorts of primitive reactions that wouldn't occur absent the contact.

For example, a couple of weeks ago the fake news fabricated a controversy regarding Mount Rushmore. Seems that some descendants of Stone Age tribes that once squatted in the area are claiming the land belongs to them, because these descendants squatted there. If this seems tautological, it's because it is. Note how they are culturally appropriating concepts of Christian civilization such as "private property" in order to assert their rights and stake their claim.

But Stone Age peoples obviously had no such concept. They knew, of course, that "what's mine is mine." But they also knew that "what's yours is mine," whether your land, your women, or your wampum. If we meet the Indians on their own cognitive ground, limiting ourselves to their own highly limited horizons, then Mount Rushmore is ours because it is ours, end of story.

The same kind of backassward thinking applies to the left's anachronistic understanding of slavery. Some of them literally believe the United State invented it. Others, such as the New York Times, imagine it is our defining feature instead of an unfortunate aberration that was totally at odds with our founding principles, condemned to be swept aside one way or the other.

But whatever it was, it wasn't a racist institution until it came under direct threat, and Democrats had to invent the concept of structural racism to explain it. They've never let go of the concept, only using it in different ways to sustain their electoral power.

Nor will they stop categorizing people by race until the practice is totally repudiated and discredited. But even then, they'll find something as a Trojan Horse for envy, hatred, cruelty, and other primitive impulses, in order to control minds and groups. It's just too effective.

So anyway, history itself may be understood as exodus WRIT LARGE. It is literally an exodus -- from animal to man, matter to spirit, biology to pneumatology, ignorance to knowledge, appearances to reality, man to God, etc. One thing we cannot say is that it is one or the other, because this collapses the tensional space in which we live and thereby curtails the exodus. Do you see why?

Marx, for example, puts the kibosh on our exodus by presuming to completely understand its material underpinnings. It is only for Special People such as Marx, or Obama, or Pelosi, to force us over to the Right Side of History that has been revealed to them.

Likewise, Darwinism in particular or scientism more generally bring the exodus to a grinding halt. If you think you're nothing more than a contingent ensemble of genes, then that's what you are. As the Master says, Each one sees in the world only what he deserves to see. Say what you want about our trolls, but their simplistic worldview is sufficient to explain themselves, at least to their own satisfaction.

Back to the main thread. Again, there's bound to be tension when diverse groups with their own interior unity and coherence bump up against one another. Now, with the internet, we don't even have to have physical contact. Twitter users, for example, we are squeezed into a tight virtual space where people are right next to people they hate. Yet they do this voluntarily. I myself tweeted for a couple of weeks a few years back, until I could no longer tolerate the smell.

Gosh, we're almost out of time. Let's wrap things up with a few relevant passages from the V man:

The completion of this idea occurs in Christianity, in which this conception of the exodus has become a fundamental category, playing a determining role in the philosophy of history...

St. Augustine formulates the problem in a way that is as valid today as ever, and "very probably will never be surpassed":

in man, in the soul, there are organizing centers [i.e., attractors]. The two principal centers are the love of self and love of God.... Between these two centers there is continual tension: man is always inclined to fall into the love of self and away from the love of God.

On the other hand, he is always conscious that he should orient himself by the love of God, and he tries to do so in many instances. Exodus is... the tendency to abandon one's entanglements with the world, to abandon the love of self, and to turn toward the love of God [AKA metanoia, vertical rebirth]. When the tension is strongest toward the love of God, then we find an exodus from the world.

Never successfully, of course. Rather, abiding in that tension-toward-God is success.

'Nuff said if you're thinking what I'm thinking: history takes place between (•) and (¶), (↑) and (↓). Who could ask for more, let alone insist upon less?