The History of the Future
The History of the Future
by
David Arthur Walters
All the information in the world crammed into boxes and manipulated to order by key-stroking workers in cubicles cannot save the world from the terror that shall overwhelm it. The world is plagued with violence, injustice, and greed, and led by pathological liars, political prostitutes, and faithless adulterers who give hypocritical lip-service to ethics filed away in boxes. The prophet Jeremiah knew very well that sacred symbols kept in a box supported by the force of arms can not constitute radical reform, for such reform must be of the living heart.
Pope Benedict thought that the resurrection of Greek Reason might confront the Eastern menace and bring a good, Western order to the world. For the Greeks themselves, however, history was a vicious cycle; they described the world as they believed it was and would ever be by virtue of eternal recurrence and transcendental archetypes. They scorned the past, thought the future would bring more of the same, and stuck to descriptive narratives of current events, i.e., contemporary histories, the sort of accounts that are praised by academia for being “modern.”
The Pope’s Logos is not really Greek nor is it reasonable: it stands for the oriental messiah, the King of the Jews, suitably Christianized. His Logos is Jesus the Christ disguised by Greek rationalizations; it stands for a bodily resurrection that defies subtle logic and common sense as well. This sacramental body is the ark or vessel of the spiritual law, the cause or reason that guarantees the believer eternal life in a grand future beyond the vicious cycles and eternal recurrences of traditionally non-historical thinking.
Now the worship of any body, no matter how perfectly it might be contrived, even if it were supposedly god incarnate, is of course idolatry, the most horrid of capital crimes as far as Orthodox Jews are concerned. The messiah is still to come for the Jews, and whether or not he is a man-god is a controversial matter to be finally settled upon arrival. In any case he shall be the real King of the Jews, and he shall bring all the nations together in harmony under the Dome.
The Christians got tired of waiting for the imminent advent of the messiah. They said he had already come and gone and would no doubt return once and for all, God only knows when, undoubtedly when the Jews are converted to Christianity and the Temple rebuilt – as matter of convenience for dispensational millenarians, all Jews and others who do not convert must perish to expedite the salvation of a few enraptured Christians.
The Hebrew messiah differs from the usual oriental messiah who marks the beginning and ending of each identical cycle; for instance, the Hindu messiah appears on a white horse to mark the end of our present dark age and the beginning yet another golden age, which will in turn inevitably degenerate again as usual to the perversity of the Kali Yuga we presently enjoy, represented by a one-legged dark elephant. But the Hebrew messiah raises his magic wand and breaks the recurrent cycle. He leads his tribe forward from that new beginning to the Promised Land, where they might forever dwell in peace and prosperity provided that they behave rightly, which they may or may not do because they are not simply determined by the forces of the past but can make quite a difference in their future. That is to say that the Hebrew was given a moral mission to fulfill or else. He had a law to abide by or not, a covenant to keep or to break, with a guarantee of rewards for good performances and punishments for breaches.
In fine, faithful Jews are loyal to their sense of justice; they believe that come what may justice shall be done in the end for justice presides over all; that sense of justice includes mercy for those who repent for their sins and do what they can to make amends; for everyone sins – they are sins and not mistakes because the perpetrator knows he does a wrong when he does it. The ancient Greeks as well believed that the sense of justice is available to all regardless of their background, wherefore all citizens were theoretically capable of participating in politics; the few who do not possess a sense of justice should be put to death for all they are worth. Jeremiah must have had a sense of justice in mind when he spoke of the radical reform of the hardened hearts of stiff-necked people. Their dishonesty and greed is perhaps only surpassed in our own day. A case-hardened heart is in effect a merciless heart. Once the casket that deadens it is removed, the law written within is enlivened; the idolized ark and the rituals appurtenant thereto may be discarded. Wherefore the early Protestants at first thought that Law could be set aside altogether by Faith, not understanding that it could only be superseded by Love, for only Love knows what is blind to Faith.
The Jews discovered history; they had a sense of linear history or progressive history, a just and meaningful line they could use to find their way out of the desert, or a rope they might use to climb out of the pit. But never mind ancient history, say enthusiasts who place their faith in continuous technological innovation and the supposedly inevitable progress of the constantly updated information age. As far as they are concerned, the study of history, which is essentially the memory of things said and done, is a vain endeavor if its events occurred prior to their lifetime. They flee from history because they suspect that its laws might determine their behavior; they turn to deterministic physical and biological sciences instead, which they believe will set them free. In any case they are certainly not interested in the history of the Old Testament; not only is the book the haunt of bigots but its history tends to support the view that morality has improved very little over the ages.
A meaningful life requires commitment to an end, and that end is a final cause that has its means. In other words, a meaningful life is a story, and a romantic one at that, with heroes and heroines, and often a tragic end, for the highest ideal cannot be realized if the race is to persist with its endeavors. Historical tales require facility in the first three liberal arts – history’s three-legged stool. But now the ancient trivium is trivial: Who needs facility in the most fundamental of liberal arts now that we have been liberated by high technology?
No, the truths of ancient history must not be true today; if they were true, we would be presently determined or made by history instead of making history according to our free will; so let history, especially the remote history of our origins, be done with. If we are in actuality doomed to repeat our mistakes, let us do so unwittingly unto extinction, for the race has to have faith in itself in order to be pleased enough with itself to go on. What that race might be besides energetically informed matter does not really matter; may the apes eventually go where no man has gone before, and place the planets under the banner of genetic evolution. The dumber the matter the better the matter is in the final analysis.
The head controls, hence the more heads the headhunter takes the greater his power: Stone Age men kept the heads of cave bears in treasury boxes. Man took his brain out of his skull and placed it in a toy box to play with. The universal computer is at our fingertips; mental masturbation is ubiquitous. We perform familiar routines almost automatically. We do not need to remember as much or to think for long thanks to the computer – Down with linear thinking!
The dumber than dumb among us are infatuated with living in the presumably progressive now, and might be even happier living as tomatoes; their attention span, about that of a gnat, limits them to immediate, superficial experience. The average reader cannot digest more than 100 words at a time, and those words must not challenge his intellectual capacity. Indeed, without memory banks and operating routines to rely upon, a postmodern person would not know what to do, would be like a dog that runs into a room and forgets why it entered. Our vision of the future is little more than a variation on the present theme, an upgrade of the status quo. We are as zombies – we have become so deluded by the superstition of progress and so hypnotized by the religion of eternal consumption of more and more that we can seldom feel anything intensely, think independently, nor act on our own behalves. In terms of our beloved progress, history is a mistake, and our ignorance of it dooms us to repeat it. The high priests of the contemporary cult reiterate it on a grander scale: even the “word of God” has yet again been misconstrued into the ritual worship of dead arbitrary signs.
Logolatry is the favored form of idolatry today: Witness the perennial misconception that words, signs, or symbols are holy in themselves. The information of the so-called information age is a fetish. Data is sacred currency accumulated in external storage devices to be manipulated externally by virtue of preordained programs. Users click on icons, stroke keys and push virtual buttons – the fear of fathers that their children become mere button pushers has come true.
Information is god, and the more we have of it the better, but what does it all mean? Corporate mammoths roam the world gorging themselves on information. Nothing shall be secret in Utopia. Wisdom is for naught for it must be privately pursued, an effort much too arduous when the massive addiction to junk can be easily aggrandized by yet another dose produced by pointing at a pretty icon and clicking the magic mouse – remarkably, the little mouse has been a subject of animistic religion since time immemorial.
Information is now worshiped by all the sects; by philosophy, sociology, psychology, and, as we have seen, by the catholic religion under the guise of Logos. Many people who claim to love humankind can barely stand the sight of each other now that they have so much information about the race; they prefer the illusion of personal control over society afforded by virtual reality. It is impossible to fight the trend with its own means and come out clean, for the fights are won by whosoever has the most excremental information, just as the manure fights back on the farm were won by the kid who was closest to the spreader.
Jeremiah in a pessimistic vein might say that we have played god and have founded our information age on a dunghill, and therefore our corpses shall soon litter the ground as dung. The potty upon which the omnipotent baby sits shall not carry us to the other side. The ark is weighted down with dung. We are being smothered by excremental culture. Too much weight is given to mass media and the revolting mess it dishes out in celebration of injustice, violence, deceit, and greed. Trivia is worshipped as if it were the power almighty. The news of contemporary history has no future but death and destruction. Attention must be paid to studying and writing histories that have a future. Everyone can at least write a life history to see where she or he may wind up given the current course of action or inaction, and then work out a better future if one is called for. There must be a moral to our stories or we are doomed to perfect our present disintegration in chaos.
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