Once Upon Every Time

The previous post wondered into the question of whether man, upon becoming man, was somehow given the operating instructions or just left to his own devices to make sense of himself, his faculties, and his purpose in being here. 

In one sense the question is idiotic but typical of the low and lurid standards of this blog. But in another sense it invites us to imaginatively drill down to the bottom of the psyche and see what we can see there. Is it really a blank slate shaped by the ups and downs, strikes and gutters, of environmental contingency? 

Ah, no. We know that much. We're not historicists. Man isn't born a nobody to be shaped any which way by external influences, but is a definite somebody -- a particular person -- right out of the gate. 

Well then, is it full of Jungian archetypes and other woowoo-ery that determine identity, behavior, and culture?

Ah, no. We're not Platonists, idealists, or rationalists.

Well, what then? An operating manual presupposes some kind of nonlocal constraint on human potential. 

Be patient. We'll get there.   

More generally, just because our answers may be idiotic, it doesn't mean the questions are, and there are three questions to which every man at every time would like the answers, please: 1) where did we come from, 2) what are we doing here, and 3) where are we going; in other words, origin, being, and destiny. 

You can pretend you don't wonder about these things, but they're nevertheless implicitly present in everything we think and do. They're in the very structure of time itself. Unless you are psychotic, a cause and consequence of which is a kind of violent dismemberment of time. 

Come to think of it, even garden variety neuroses do damage to time's flow; for example, a compulsion creates a kind of temporal eddy, while impulsivity short circuits the path to the future, and trauma freezes one in the past. 

There is actually a "wrong side of history," e.g., presentism, anachronism, progressivism, etc. 

In fact, I was just reading about these historical fallacies in a book of essays by Gordon Wood called The Purpose of the Past. I wasn't planning on blogging about it, but perhaps it has a point or two we can misuse for our own lurid purposes. He's especially hard on our postmodern deconstructionists, and although he's far too polite to call them frankly psychotic, the diagnostic shoe fits:

If historians began doubting that there was an objective past reality that they were trying to recover and began thinking that what they did was simply make up the past and write something that was akin to fiction, then... they were actually undermining the ground for any sort of historical reconstruction at all.

The result is that history "has become fragmented -- all pieces, all flashes of experience, no wholes." They "cannot see the forest for the trees" because "there are no forests." 

Yes, crazy. But this is the underlying philosophy of Critical Race Theory and all those other epistemological diseases. And as mentioned above, they surely do violence to time, for they are "tantamount to using a nuclear weapon that could be subsequently used against" themselves.  

I was thinking about this yesterday, when I heard a story about the editors of the UCSB student newspaper, who have vowed to censor any story that might hurt, trigger, or alienate a single snowflake. Well, hold on a second: since I am an enthusiastic proponent of the first amendment, what if I am triggered by their assault on free speech? 

Anyway, the purpose of the past isn't to ransack it in order to find something useful to one's present political wishes. Rather, 

To understand the past in all its complexity is to acquire historical wisdom and humility and indeed a tragic sense of life. A tragic sense does not mean a sad or pessimistic sense of life; it means a sense of the limitations of life.... 

[H]istory tends to inculcate skepticism about our ability to manipulate purposefully our destinies.

Well, no wonder the left hates it! But guess what, he whispered creepily: doesn't Genesis 3 convey this same pessimessage, only implicitly, via myth? To understand history -- and the Fall of man -- is to know that "few things work out the way we intend."

But in order for a progressive to get things done, he needs to forget the past entirely, which is why Brandon is their ideal leader.

So, let's go back, way back, to "Eden" and suppose our man in nirvana was handed the One True Philosophy upon crossing the threshold from biology to prehistory some 100,000 years ago. Indeed, this seems only sporting, considering what we were up against: the elements, other animals, and especially other people, for it seems there were assouls from the start, or within moments of it, anyway. 

With regard to the missing operating manual, Maritain asks whether it was "possible that this knowledge, together with the primitive religion in which it was incorporated, could be transmitted in its integrity by the human race?"

Recall that the edge of history is myth, and that myth didn't just happen once upon a time, but happens every time. Here's one: 

Once upon a timeless the world had one language, one philosophy, and one religion. But people will be people, and it can't get worse than that, so they decided to build an ivory tower that reached up to the heavens in order to make tenure for themselves. 

In his commentary on Genesis 11, Dennis Prager notes a couple of ironies, but I gotta transport my son to a class, so to be continued...