Lunch Hour Thoughts # 1
On History
It's good to be back to posting and writing again. As I had mentioned elsewhere on the air and on some community posts, I have recently taken on a new full time job. This one is in office, not remote, so adjusting to a new schedule has been difficult. I wanted to take on a challenge to myself to write a thousand words or more a day on various topics, so today I wanted write on history and the way so many of my colleagues and myself might look at history and historical narratives. Tomorrow will be on something completely different, so be sure to stay tuned. I pray that this will help me become more disciplined in my writing and content output, and I plan to be back with longer more fleshed out opinions soon.
"The Thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is nothing new under the sun."
- Ecclesiastes 1:9
History has an odd way of rhyming, repeating, and taking turns on scales that it is hard for us to comprehend, let alone see full parts without dedication to the discipline that takes a lifetime. Perhaps it is because Man is (mostly) oriented around pattern recognition, historical trends and recurrences tend to happen. Man also hasn't beaten his passions, wherein rulers and armies have won and lost over due to pride or lust over a single objective so comparisons of today's world and antiquity are all but inevitable. Even then a comprehensive historical narrative, of even the smallest parts of history are often shrouded and complicated due to our own biases or even the biases of ourselves. From our current historiography of progressive presentism to the warring historical records of partisan newspapers in the early American Republic, a man of any political or religious stripe can take the record a la carte and tell a through line that tries to explain why the world is the way that it is. Objective history, if such a thing truly exists, leaves us with data and events yet it leaves historians, politicians, and ordinary people to step up to tell the tale.
History is essential in how civilizations and people relate to, contextualize and exist in the present, but as well building a narrative through-line towards the future in their own actions from an individual to a family level. A son may look to the trade or the legacy of his fathers, a nation may look to its great men to build towards the future of its society. In the current existential political and civilizational conflicts we find ourselves in today, history is a weapon in the struggle for the future. A delivery vehicle that contain various trajectories for peoples and civilizations, ones many have seen in the past, and also to directions we will not see until long after our lifetimes.
Numerous writers have turned to the historians of the past to pitch their takes as to how we've gotten ourselves in this present era; Gibbon, Eusebius, Toynbee, Kant, Josephus, Livy, Spengler, Schmitt, Carlyle, and countless others have been cited by many cohorts and scholars pointing to parallels but also as foundational bedrocks for our historical narratives - cultural expressions of our world and the expressions of various civilizations. Of course this is just one facet of many things that make up cultural, civilizational and ethnic expressions of peoples, but history as both concept and reality are on my mind. Yet many go to these writers and men of history to point to our present moment as a trajectory for the beginning of the end, or the nearing towards the edge of collapse.
With rampant anarcho-tyranny, invasions across the borders facilitated by the State, looting of the treasury and collapse in religious belief and public trust, if there is inevitability to what we are on, it appears we have a handy guide albeit without the modern technology that may make this era of fall all the more difficult to recover from. However any struggle for survival of a civilization or people, those looking to carve the next great chapter of their history or a new founding mythos must rely on history and their circumstances to do so. Just as Virgil opens the Aeneid with homage and reference to Homer for the Story of Rome, or even American founders citing antiquity and English history (Federalists and Anti-Federalists alike), so to must the struggle to re-root, replanting ourselves historically must be mindful of what's past to reach for a future.
This is not a call to be nostalgic, but realistic. Nostalgia can be found for many things, from childish baubles to the recognition that greatness came and went away with the great divorce from history that so many claim ended or came and went. Rather that history must be understood from a place that explicates a narrative of struggle, defeat, and victory. History must not serve as a salve for hurt feelings or existential dread- people do come and go, but it should serve as a foundational bedrock for something of a long struggle. God loves a happy warrior, after all.
One only needs to look at those who are completely divorced from history, or replanted in a history whose deepness is that of topsoil. The antifascist history of the United States, a global crusade wherein fascism is the dress of Satan, has led to its own founding stock and principles to be chief among the demons while paradoxically those same men who fought in a war against a fascist state are considered the same kind of anti-fascists of today's modern progressive foot soldiers. If you exist forever in the now, aided by the stimulants of a 24 hour news cycle of drama, headlines, article extracts and the rest, it will be easy to disavow something that wasn't on message or historically progressive just three weeks ago even if it came out of their own mouth.
What struggle is there in the eternal now? A presentism so far off and so far divorced from what was normal, not just in the context of the decades but the centuries, that it is only about the now because even the progressive present of just 2008 would be considered "too reactionary" for the taste of many today. I recall a discussion where someone had said Stalin would be seen as counterrevolutionary for "not being a trans ally." As I've written previously, to be stuck in the present, a history so new and different that to be divorced from history is to throw yourself into the wilderness, and unlike Romulus and Remus you'll be eaten by those who do have a clue not to mention the spiritual wolf. There is no struggle but divorce, deracinate, de-terriotorialize, and come to an end with a chiliastic ending that has no Kingdom without end but rather a horde of a welcomed other that will happily erase what history was once your own only now disregard it for the sake progress.
But if that's the end of history, then the end of history is death.
More on that later, Lunch Hour's over.