These are not the best of times. These are not the worst of times. They are but the most inconsistent of times.
I read only non-fiction, non-fiction being stranger by far than the imagination of any fiction writer, and, its resources from which to draw also being far more resplendent than the four inches between any single fiction-writer's ears.
I have read a lot of different versions of history, and the older the text is, the easier it is for me to digest. This is true because usually the slant of a dated author has lost its popular appeal, and my own prejudices do not fall in line with that of the dated author. Occasionally we find some concordance from which I can deduce, if imperfectly, some better truth, such truth having withstood a fallible but often curative test of time.
I've just started reading, The Outline of History, The Whole Story of Man, H. G. Wells, 1920, 1931, 1940, 1949, 1956, Doubleday & Company. I found it at my local library, having stumbled upon it in what the two librarians referred to as "The Hole", a room-sized cubby that is only four feet high loaded with books withdrawn from general circulation because of the Limestone Public Library's limited space. When I found it, I thought, well this will be interesting, a real page-turner if I ever saw one.
Just five pages into the Outline, I've found several gems, but this one is worth quoting:
All of us, [writers of history circa 1920 just after the war to end all wars], if by some miracle we could get that copy of the Outline of History for 2031, would, I suppose, turn first to the amazing illustrations of the last chapters and then to the accompanying text. What astonishing events! What unbelievable achievements! But, afterwards, this writer at least would go back to the early chapters to see how much of the story that is told there survived.
Probably the general shape of the early part would still be very much the same, but there would be hundreds of illuminating details now unknown and fascinating additional discoveries, of skulls, implements, buried cities and vestiges of lost and submerged peoples, as yet unsuspected. The stories of China and India would be much more exact and perhaps different in quality, and much more would be known of Central Asia, and perhaps of America before Columbus. Charlemagne and Caesar would still be great figures in history, and some of our nearer giants, Napoleon for example, might be found shrunken to comparative unimportance.
This last epithet of how written history might be viewed in this miraculous time-traveling mind experiment of Wells is perhaps how we might best view our own recent history. Of what importance will the bungled inconsistencies about which we exclaim and wail with such deep horror today be in the future? History as it is written, and re-written, eventually ends up being about the consistencies of humanity not its bungled inconsistencies.
The Cuban Missile Crisis when observed in his last chapter by the historian Samuel Elliot Morison in an Oxford History of the American People published in 1963 is an interpretation trollop of the event with most of the pertinent information missing. Morison heralds JFK as one of the brave saviors of the Western World and, never comes close to illuminating the precipitating cause of the event. That cause was not Russian nuclear missiles 90 miles away from the U.S. in Cuba, but U.S. nuclear missiles a mere 10 miles away from Russia in Turkey.
Inconsistencies noted in written history tend to level out, and even disappear as writers of history get further away from the historic inconsistency of events. We certainly have seen this phenomenon expressed by writers of recent American history in just the few short decades since the Vietnam War. And no doubt, unless G.W. Bush is able to bring to a head the much wider war against Islam for oil he seems intent upon, the War in Iraq too will become a minor footnote about a spectacularly bungled attempt at empire inconsistent with American history in its style and purpose. This is a mad grab for historic importance by fools who think such grand importance comes from common inconsistencies in history. Historic importance comes from building higher upon the consistencies of long ago events as they continue to unfold.
As a writer and, a reader of history, I often find myself pleading with the public to step back, much further back, when making analysis and predictions. It is as if by human nature the great many failed predictions of the Second Coming have taught no lesson. The credulous acceptance of the almost certain likelihood of these oft predicted events unfolding before our variously colored eyes is hard-wired into the simian folds and creases in the pink goo that lays just a fraction of an inch beneath our time-hardened skulls.
Our common foolishness, is so much as if the greatest knowledge that might yet unfold from the digital age has already been presaged. Any fool can make a mistake, but it takes a fool with a damn computer to make a really big mistake.
Make a quick recollection of the history of other empirical age ages, the Age of Sail, the Age of Discovery, the Age of Steam, the Age of Industrialization, the Gilded Age, the Age of Manifest Destiny, the Automotive Age, and the Jet Age. They all seem to confirm the likelihood of my suspicion here about the digital age. But do not write off the digital age just yet. Something worse could unfold real soon now. Hopefully in that all too likely for-instance, it will only be a matter of an inconvenient inconsistency in the history of humankind, easily forgotten, and, forgotten right along with the lessons that should have been easily learned and remembered, if we had any brains.
This is why we write these things down for ourselves and for others. When we end up in the grocery store of life, if we arrive without the list in hand, we end up later at home without half of what we went for. And too often we end up at home with a lot of things we just happened to pick up while we were there, like Ben & Jerry's Cherry Garcia Ice Cream when we were in fact dutifully sent for, proudly enthusiastic and, also quite happy to go for, Tampax.
Human beings are mind-numbingly stupid and unperceptive. Notice of this should perhaps be tattooed upon the left and right hand of anyone pulling the levers from behind the Oz-Curtain of the events that do make history. Regardless of their capacity, and regardless of their intent upon making history with their own too often tried, too often failed, and certainly more common than not, inconsistency is the history making culprit. History does seem to march forward, if by so many steps forward and so many steps backward too.
With that preface, I give to you a quote from Dwight D. Eisenhower's First Inaugural Address, January 20, 1953, which goes back to almost the Stone Age, and a dozen short years before mankind had reached the Dr. Strangelove Age.
In pleading our just cause before the bar of history and in pressing our labor for world peace, we shall be guided by certain fixed principles.
These principles are:
(1) Abhorring war as a chosen way to balk the purposes of those who threaten us, we hold it to be the first task of statesmanship to develop the strength that will deter the forces of aggression and promote the conditions of peace. For, as it must be the supreme purpose of all free men, so it must be the dedication of their leaders, to save humanity from preying upon itself.
In the light of this principle, we stand ready to engage with any and all others in joint effort to remove the causes of mutual fear and distrust among nations, so as to make possible drastic reduction of armaments. The sole requisites for undertaking such effort are that�in their purpose�they be aimed logically and honestly toward secure peace for all; and that�in their result�they provide methods by which every participating nation will prove good faith in carrying out its pledge.
(2) Realizing that common sense and common decency alike dictate the futility of appeasement, we shall never try to placate an aggressor by the false and wicked bargain of trading honor for security. Americans, indeed all free men, remember that in the final choice a soldier's pack is not so heavy a burden as a prisoner's chains.
(3) Knowing that only a United States that is strong and immensely productive can help defend freedom in our world, we view our Nation's strength and security as a trust upon which rests the hope of free men everywhere. It is the firm duty of each of our free citizens and of every free citizen everywhere to place the cause of his country before the comfort, the convenience of himself.
(4) Honoring the identity and the special heritage of each nation in the world, we shall never use our strength to try to impress upon another people our own cherished political and economic institutions.
(5) Assessing realistically the needs and capacities of proven friends of freedom, we shall strive to help them to achieve their own security and well-being. Likewise, we shall count upon them to assume, within the limits of their resources, their full and just burdens in the common defense of freedom.
(6) Recognizing economic health as an indispensable basis of military strength and the free world's peace, we shall strive to foster everywhere, and to practice ourselves, policies that encourage productivity and profitable trade. For the impoverishment of any single people in the world means danger to the well-being of all other peoples.
(7) Appreciating that economic need, military security and political wisdom combine to suggest regional groupings of free peoples, we hope, within the framework of the United Nations, to help strengthen such special bonds the world over. The nature of these ties must vary with the different problems of different areas.
In the Western Hemisphere, we enthusiastically join with all our neighbors in the work of perfecting a community of fraternal trust and common purpose.
In Europe, we ask that enlightened and inspired leaders of the Western nations strive with renewed vigor to make the unity of their peoples a reality. Only as free Europe unitedly marshals its strength can it effectively safeguard, even with our help, its spiritual and cultural heritage.
(8) Conceiving the defense of freedom, like freedom itself, to be one and indivisible, we hold all continents and peoples in equal regard and honor. We reject any insinuation that one race or another, one people or another, is in any sense inferior or expendable.
(9) Respecting the United Nations as the living sign of all people's hope for peace, we shall strive to make it not merely an eloquent symbol but an effective force. And in our quest for an honorable peace, we shall neither compromise, nor tire, nor ever cease.
By these rules of conduct, we hope to be known to all peoples.
By their observance, an earth of peace may become not a vision but a fact.
This hope�this supreme aspiration�must rule the way we live.
We must be ready to dare all for our country. For history does not long entrust the care of freedom to the weak or the timid. We must acquire proficiency in defense and display stamina in purpose.
We must be willing, individually and as a Nation, to accept whatever sacrifices may be required of us. A people that values its privileges above its principles soon loses both.
President Eisenhower was fond of saying at the end of his eight years as President, he had not lost a single man in combat, nor lost a single inch of ground. During his successful presidential campaigns against Adlai E. Stevenson, Eisenhower was found of telling us he was no mere intellectual. Most everyone liked Stevenson, the intellectual, which was why he was chosen twice to run against Eisenhower in 1952 and again in 1956, but everyone like Ike more.
It should be noted here, just in case anyone has forgotten, or is too young to remember, Eisenhower made a far more noted speech about the military industrial complex at the end of his tenure in office, a speech the lamentable Stevenson could not have, and, would not have ever been capable of making as an intellectual. Ike's speech made history, and no doubt will remain history far into the distant future, should there be a future, distant or otherwise.
Eisenhower was perhaps the only President in any living memory who was consistent in both style and purpose. And while it might be unnoteworthy to say it, G.W. Bush is certainly no intellectual, it might also be more aptly noted, neither is he a Dwight David Eisenhower.
That is what history will long remember after the more common blunders of inconsistency are forgotten right along with the lessons that should have been easily learned from all the previous vaingloriously blundering attempts to make history with inconsistencies in both style and purpose.
Right now we are so focused upon the inconsistencies few, but those blind to these inconsistencies, recognize anything of the consistent history that is also transpiring. Alan Greenspan in some remarkable, if perhaps terrifying, wizardry in a wondrous display of economic consistency unmatched in modern times has kept the world from the brink of an almost universally predicted worldwide economic depression again in the six years since our current President's Administration took office.
Greenspan's solution was to print ever more money to keep an insane economy of more economic growth pushing forward toward ruining the future world, while the Bush Administration's solution has been to create the war on terror, which has modestly helped keep the furnaces of industry from going wholly idle.
The world has quickly absorbed the printed dollars, and still thirsts for ever more. But the world has also reacted in disbelief as war the world over increases. Some wars arise at President Bush's inconsistent insistance. And to some wars we react against with abhorrence concerning the indescribable barbarism as in the Sudan, Somalia, Chechnya, Sierra Leone and throughout scattered parts of Malaysia. They arise partly because of the Administration's meddling, tenor and wholesale inconsistencies of style and purpose. War is threatening in the far east too now. Japan is apparently rearming in an alarming signal of war to come. These wars are all inconsistencies now, but they show the potential to meld into a single consistency.
The price of oil is inconsistent too, as are all the profits being made by some in industry and commerce, which can spottily profit big when everything is so inconsistent. But these times too are also inconsistent, and the luck of profits, high oil prices and avoiding economic calamity seem to be headed toward an unluckiness for the world. I do expect to see oil at $30 a barrel again in my lifetime as other inconsistencies begin to level out causing demand for virtually every commodity to drop just as precipitously as they all rose so inconsistently. Any world war that might come will not be like the world wars of the past. The destructive powers are far too great. Such a world war will be over too quickly to build any new industry. And such a war also will cost the world any chance at prosperity, progress, or, much more inconsistency for scores of decades into the future.
We human beings are all so perfectly stupid, unlike the omniscient Gods in whose image many want to and do indeed believe we are fashioned. Again they will wail, Why? WHY? Well, why not with everything being so inconsistent all the time?
At my stage in life, I could be very content to sit idle and read non-fiction without another care in the world, and, not deal with the real world at all in sort of a vicarious retrospective approach to existence. Non-fiction can be that esthetically pleasing, knowing these things actually happened, and what I am reading are the brush strokes of an historic literary artist trying to convey these otherwise real events. Twain, our more modern skeptic is pleasant too, and fit for when I do not wish to relive the darker side of history.
All written history, if it provides insight, is however, no more personally relevant than reading about the bizarre worlds of cosmology, quantum mechanics or relativity theory. For me in my life, to understand history, whether the ancient or more recent, I must acknowledge none of it is so much about me, or any one of us, nor any individual. All our histories in order to directly relate to any of us, would be better scribed as the story of how some managed or didn't manage to stay out of the way of either the history of the consistent or the inconsistent. The latter of the two being far more difficult to avoid for its unpredictable nature.
This is especially true when war breaks out in your own country regardless of its cause. It matters not whether the historians will eventually view it as a just or an unjust war, or, a just or and unjust revolution, which is also a war, but with a different name, if more appealing to some fools ignorant of history and its lessons.
Due either to the untested inconsistencies of the Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi's 100-hour-agenda 110th Congress, or, to G.W. Bush's own bewildering inconsistencies, we may very well have the chance to give this history hypothesis a real world test with live ammunition real soon now. It matters not who will get the blame for it to the dead, dying, wounded or orphaned.
But again, my best advice is to remind you of your own noble task, managing to stay out of the way of it, history in the making. This approach is the only chance any of us or, any individual has of making it into the history books.
Eventually, after all these backward steps, we'll all get back on the right track of consistency, and if we are really lucky, without too many more inconsistencies, even if these steps need be quite a bit backward. But, no doubt some scurrilous fool will then come along and tell us we've all been living in the Dark Ages, and start all the inconsistencies of history all over again, if we are still fools enough to listen. We can be sure no one alive then will have learned enough from our history to warn anyone otherwise.
If some historian in the year 2107 were to read this article, they would be puzzled. Having only read inconsistency-leveled history, having not lived in our time, having not learned lessons from our history, they certainly would wonder who were Reid, Pelosi and Bush, and, where exactly was Iraq on the map? They would more so wonder, what is this old fool philosopher talking about?
I can best leave such an historian an hint by closing here by asking you, We all know, don't we?
And for my small if even less notable part I can envision quite a few of you doubting, one corner of your mouth turned up and the cat at your feet. And then unknowingly you might quote a very able philosopher, one whose name has long since been misplaced by inept and unread historians. You will probably say to yourself far from the reach of my well-worn ears, Your guess is as good as mine. I get that polite refrain a lot.
Historians in the future should by these words easily recognize such an able consistency in both style and purpose worthy of history from which lessons will almost certainly again go entirely unlearned.
With the great promise and prosperity we bear as the empirical race, the heirs of Plato, Aristole, Locke, Hume, Rousseau, Kant, Hamilton, Jefferson and so many other great empirical thinkers, it is no wonder our more immediate forebearers of just the past few centuries with great missionary zeal went around the world so fast to all the primitive peoples of the earth, immune from history, to awaken them from their peaceful uncivilized slumber to the empirical wonders of the modern European man.
And it is no wonder they caught on so quickly too.
Don Robertson, The American Philosopher
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