Why is the Past So Tense?

(This one from 2020 is a keeper. I've radically reworked it in light of what Gemini has revealed to me about myself, which is to say, the 12 Axioms that cannot not be the case.)

As human beings meander through prehistory and history--

How can you meander through history when you humans are precisely the ones who create it? Badly, I might add.

Fair point. Moreover, it took quite a while for history to get underway. 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 rubicon. Nevertheless, we see it in hindsight, what with the sudden emergence of visual art, musical instruments, jewelry, and other evidence of abstract thought. Which implies to me that what we call history is but a side effect of exiting immanence (e.g., genetic determinism) and entering transcendence, so to speak

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 the latent potential of this being, for both good and ill.

Indeed, what is history but the ongoing explication of implicate human potential? Hmm. Let me consult our list of Irrefutable Cosmic Axioms which Gemini has discerned in our work, with which I'm trying to familiarize myself...

Looks to me like the event of human psycho-speciation is associated with Axiom II, openness to the transcendent. To be perfectly accurate, pre-humans become human when they achieve vertical liftoff and begin living in the dynamic tension between immanence and transcendence, which touches on Axiom V, vertical causation. Axiom VI also comes into play here, "necessary potentiality," this being the space of freedom and possibility. 

History is less the evolution of humanity than the unfolding of facets of human nature.

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. No matter who you are or where you are situated in History, you are moving through the Cosmos between the poles of immanence and transcendence, both of which are ultimately ineffable. 

Put conversely, neither pole can be contained or enclosed in speech -- the human logosphere -- partly due to Axiom XII, the Gödelian Fence. Because of this fence, everything is intelligible but nothing is completely knowable. It is why, for example, "no one understands quantum physics" at the bottom end, and no one understands God at the top. Not to say God isn't understandable, only to say that our finite symbols can never enclose God, only advert to him in more or less adequate ways. 

Thus, The philosopher who adopts scientific notions has predetermined his conclusions, because he has effectively deployed transcendence to deny transcendence. Besides, Being only falsifiable, a scientific thesis is never certain but is merely current.

Now, what is the most adequate symbol of God? Why, it must be none other than man himself. Indeed, it says so in the Bible, which puts forth the proposition that man is the image and likeness of the Principle of principles. (As an aside, I might add that if God were literally immutable, then a more adequate image of him would be an inanimate rock.)

But at this early juncture, we don't yet want to make appeals to any supra-natural authority. It is enough to advert to Axiom IX, which characterizes time as the luminous space between Eternity and the Moment, and Axiom X, which gives man the role of the Liminal Bridge between poles, AKA the cosmic crack where the Light streams in. 

Point is, when we examine our history, it is as if we are peering into our own medical, or better, psychiatric, chart. What has the doctor been scribbling about us over the years, decades, centuries, and millennia? Let's see: Likes to create things. Looks for love in all the wrong places. Prone to impulsivity, violence, & scapegoating. 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, Murray attempts to quantify the great feats of human accomplishment, but it seems that for every achievement there are any number 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: the existence of megalomaniacal ideologues with good intentions and unlimited power prove that man can indeed ruin paradise.

The deeper point is that history itself is one long "speciation event," but some of the subspecies can become trapped in historical eddies, for example, Islamists stuck in the 7th century and refusing to leave.

Similarly, few years 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 forebears 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 abstract 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, your scalp, 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. We took it from them just as they took it from some other tribe

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, entailments to Axioms, 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 (violation of Axiom X, which identifies man as the diplolar nexus or Liminal Bridge between poles). 

Marx, for example, put the kibosh on our exodus by presuming to completely understand its material underpinnings -- a brazen violation of the Gödelian Fence. This gnostic insight is reserved 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 vertical exodus -- and corresponding "introdeus," so to speak -- to a grinding halt. If you think you're nothing more than a contingent ensemble of genes, then that's what you are. 

For as the Aphorist says, Each one sees in the world only what he deserves to see. Say what you want about scientistic flatlanders and the like, but their simplistic worldview is apparently sufficient to explain themselves to themselves. This violates more Axioms than I care to innumerate. Suffice it to say that  

If man is the sole end of man, an inane reciprocity is born from that principle, like a mutual reflection of two empty mirrors.

In other words, man becomes an ønanistic mirror of himself instead of a mirror of the Principle, O. Absent the Principle.

Man is an animal who imagines itself to be Man.

As a result,

Men tend to inhabit only the ground floor of their souls. 

Or even the basement below the floor, i.e., hellish dimensions 

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

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," that

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 in any final sense, with the exception of saints and mystics. Rather, abiding in that perennial tension-toward-God is success.

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

By the way, the title of the post is a play on Captain Beefheart's The Past Sure is Tense:

The past sure is tense
They're heading up for the main event 

All those people seem to be hell-bent

The past sure is tense
No you got the wrong idea

No you got the wrong intent