The End of History?

Weekly Musings – The End of History?
J Sweeney
5/22/02

This topic has been on my mind quite a bit of late, but no organizing theme has come forward to serve. I’d like to discuss the nature of historical perspective, political freedom, and the pursuit of meaning in life, but how to tie them together? Perhaps I can’t, at least not yet.

I’ve been writing “Weekly Musings” for over two years now. Like any hobby or craft you learn things as you go. It’s the act of doing that makes progress possible. Often I have stumbled to produce a piece for weeks at a time, and I have yet to produce a work worthy of the ideas or attention provided by you the reader. However, I have learned this lesson. Sometimes, you just have to go forward even though the path is unclear. It is very easy to wait for the perfect answer, the right choice, the ideal moment to act, but that never arrives. We end up waiting for something external to occur before we initiate the internal work, and that leads to stagnation.

So, here I go. I’ll just start writing and we’ll see what comes of it.

I believe we live in the dark ages. In case you missed that or thought it was a teaser phrase to get you thinking, let me repeat. We live in the dark ages. This is not the age of reason, the dawn of the future, the moment of humanities greatness. This is an age of darkness. It is not the end of history, but rather a moment in time that future generations will look back on and shake their heads in wonder. They’ll review our works of art, our political structures, our social compassion, and arrogance, planetary isolation, and anonymity with horror. They’ll be amazed we survived at all.

Before you begin to espouse to me the Herculean achievements of our age, the wonders of modern medicine, the unprecedented freedoms, the unrivaled standard of living, and the power of communications technology, let me remind you of a secret you may have forgotten. We don’t live at the end of history.

I know it seems like it. I know that during school most of us were told how early man developed agricultural technologies about five to ten thousand years ago that let former hunter-gathers settle down and farm somewhere in Samaria. A little later that culture was taken up in the valley of the Nile. The flooding river gave rise to a surplus economy. Trade and culture were born and shared. Not long thereafter Hamurabi codified specific laws that would be applied equally and the concept of social justice was born. The gods, Astrology, craft specialization, etc were born.

Soon the Greeks, the Fathers of Western Civilization, took all that had come before them, and created a Golden Age of arts, science, rhetoric, and political freedom. Here our history classes usually got fuzzy again, and the demise of Greece, Athens and Sparta, etc. were left to barbarians, our imaginations, and the conquering Romans. Fine, let’s pretend. So Rome the small city, became the Republic, became the Empire. Ah, the end of history. Each of these societies is chosen in our history classes because we know of them, and they each seemed to be the result of history up to that point. We pretend that the line of succession of better and better civilizations leads right past the Rennasiance, the Magna Carta, and up to the Declaration of Independence, the US Constitution, the Civil War, World Wars I and II, the lessons of Vietnam, the fall of the Berlin wall, and the end of Communism. What a joke.

This history we have been sold is not only erroneous and self-serving for the elite, but it is dangerous. It leads us to feelings of contentment and also social arrogance. We are not the result of history. We are merely a spurious offshoot and perhaps an altogether unimportant one.

Choose any objective measure of a culture and we shall come up wanting against many of these that I mentioned. Choose any measure and compare it to where we might have been if we didn’t succumb to the deceits of our age and we shall fall so short of the mark as to be truly depressing.

Art? What piece of art, what theater or play, what music or song will be in the hearts of humanity two thousand years from now? What piece of our artistic culture resounds so deeply with the human experience that you would expect it to survive transition to another culture, another nation, or perhaps even another planet?

Science? Fundamentally what new and provable truth is the product of our country’s pursuit of technology? The atom was described in the Vedas (ancient Sanskrit writings) over six thousand years ago. The anatomy of the brain is described in detail on the wall of the tombs of mummified Egyptian kings. Perhaps you would point to the horseless carriage, but it still travels on roads built by the Romans in some places, so not much has changed there. We went to the moon you say, that can stand as our achievement. Did you go? Can you even prove anyone did?

Communication? Yes, we communicate more quickly and with larger audiences than any other civilization we know of throughout all of history. But, has the quality improved? Is something faster always better? Do our news broadcasts and web sites convey more clearly the totality of events and their meaning than the carefully crafted speeches and letters of medieval France? Do our politicians tell us more truth than Hammurabi did to his subjects?

Standard of Living? Do we not still stack bricks, sticks, stones, and steel into the shapes of caves to guard ourselves against the weather and others in our tribe? Do we not still wrap cloth about our bodies to preserve them from the elements and the eyes of others? Do we not still eat roots taken from the ground and the flesh of other living creatures? Do we not still seek entertainment to free ourselves from boredom? Do we not still work more hours than we wish, doing things we would not do unless we were paid to do them? Do we still not die younger than we hope with more things left undone than we’d like? Our waste is still carried from our house by pipes that may eventually rot and burst. Many families still collapse under the weight of the pursuit of material goods.

Freedom? Ah, freedom the bell weather of the great US culture. Surely in this realm we are supreme. If nowhere else, at least in this we are masters of history. Really? Whose voice was heard loudest in the Oval Office when energy policy was being decided, yours or some wealthy man’s, or some corporation that was lying to us? Did the popular vote win the election last time? Do you not lock your car door at night? Does your house have an alarm or a dog to protect you? Can you freely walk the streets at night without fear? Can you travel the world without threat of being targeted because of your country’s actions (which you don’t have a voice in anyway)? Can you say what you think without the “PC” police calling you a racist, sexist, or bigot? Can you practice your religion without others labeling you as an extremist or pagan? Can you grow an herb in your garden and smoke it without first checking if it is legal? Can you drink fermented beverages without waiting three years until after you have registered to die in a foreign land in a war you disagree with? Can you choose? Does some government-enforced monopoly determine your “choice” of cable provider, medical insurance, or local phone company? Can you elect not to pay taxes that support programs you wholeheartedly disagree with?

What freedoms we think we have are not new. Choosing what job to work at and pay taxes from is not freedom. An election where wealth controls the outcome is not self-rule. Closing your mouth at of fear of persecution is not free speech. A National Guard sent oversees in service of the government is not a militia that will protect us from infringement of rights. Holding suspects indefinitely for visa violations is not justice. The use of conversations with your advocate being used against you in a court of law is not privacy. Random screening of all travelers is an assumption of guilt, not innocence. New Federal Agencies with broad “Security” mandates, armed and organized beyond the capacity of a State are a threat to Freedom, not an assurance of it.

We are moving slowly (or quickly depending on your perspective) toward tyranny. We are doing so because we believe in the righteousness of our leaders, whom we believe are serving our interests because we elected them. We did not elect them. More importantly they do not serve us when they choose our safety over our freedom.

History is a long story of, often unrelated, chapters. It is not a planned movement from one high society to the next. It is instead a record of the choices made by various peoples in their most trying moments.

This nation has never chosen science before technology or art before commerce. Art and Science are the long-term achievements of significant investments in education and research. Throughout history, they have required the benefit of wealthy donors for their sustenance. So it is not surprising if history does not look back and marvel at our achievements in this regard.

Freedom, self-rule, these are our hallmarks. We have repeatedly thrown off the shackles of elitism, tyranny, and slavery here and abroad. We have been the beacon during our dark age for those willing to sacrifice any luxury or comfort for the inalienable right of self-determination. We have always chosen to risk our lives for the sake of freedom.

Now, once again we are faced with a choice. Do we wish to live in a free society where we rely one another to preserve safety, or would we rather hand over our freedom to a national government that promises to protect us? We already know that the Federal Government is unable and potentially unwilling to protect us. We also know that the same body does not trust us to regulate ourselves.

Have we come too far? Is our violence to great, our lower class too desperate, our population to aged and too comfortable? How do we turn back the hands of a government that seeks to number us, monitor us, search us, label us, and protect us? How does our voice become heard if our votes don’t count?

Is this the end of our history?

Perhaps future historians will look back at this “Great Experiment” in democracy and say, “Here, here is the point when they grew weak, when they yielded to fear and handed over their freedom. Here is when the Republic died and the Empire was born.”