Of course it’s our duty to fight the battles of the present day, protect our nation and our children to the extent we can by opposing each malevolent change and threat.
But we owe a larger debt as well. We have to acknowledge that we are on track for an imminent Dark Age, not only consenting in it as a culture but officially hastening and promoting it.
The supposedly most intelligent, highly educated, and privileged among us are engaged in a relentless assault on the culture that begot their presumed talents for insight and global wisdom. They control and are our future, which means that in the long view we are doomed.
Because there are enemies who desire to sack our cities and undo our achievements, the most notable of which is consciousness itself. They are the primary cowards of life as we have become the secondary ones. They don’t want to be self aware in the first place. We, in all our pseuodo-intellectual vandalism of our own heritage, want to undo the pain of consciousness and become obedient mediocrities, indistinguishable units, equal drones in a global hive (unless, of course, as in all cultures from the beginning of time, we can be one of the “more equal” drones in charge.)
Only one strain of civilization has ever aspired to individuality as an ideal and defined human rights in those terms. All the ascendant rivals have an ideal almost exactly opposite.
Specific discussions of world politics aside, the rivals are poised to win in the near term. We are too civilized to prevail against them because we have forgotten, or chosen deliberately to overlook, what barbarism is. The barbarian does not care about the individual except as a statistic of ergs or casualty totals. If the individual does not submit to the uniformity of the hive, he is a target for extermination or failing that, abject subjugation, cruel punishments, and arbitrary executions.
We have lost the cultural consensus that might enable us to defend ourselves against those who don’t care how many of their own they kill to inflict unequal damage on us. In our silly delusional tower, we are unable to detect the intransigent murder in their eyes and the single-mindedness of automatons with a mission. Instead we kid ourselves that there is some way to placate them, make deals with them, and hope that we can counter malice with benevolence to good effect. And so we make excuses for them and demonize the ones in our own camp who see an avowed enemy as exactly what that enemy avows he is.
Therefore we lose. The nightmare slaughter and oppression will come, and many of our children and their children will not survive, at least in any form we envision. That’s how the odds look right now, anyway. Time to prepare. It needs must be.
What to do?
I have two suggestions. One requiring deep personal commitment and a second requiring deep personal commitment, technical skills, and clever organization.
The first is a kind of proclamation of individuality. For the record. Whoever you are, no matter how mundane you think your life is, get a blog or write a journal. Don’t think in terms of building an audience. Think of documenting the individual experiences of you and your family, what you think about them, what you believe, what you treasure from smallest to most life changing. If you blog, make paper copies. If you do a journal or diary, make photocopies. Think of how you might preserve your record through a long long darkness of barbarian rule.
The second is an adjunct to the first. Think about creating a large population of time capsules. Sink them deep enough into the ground to remain unfound for 200, 500, 1000, 2000 years. Stuff them with the evidence that you existed — your journals, your family photos, your favorite music, the books that contain your beliefs and emotional touchstones, everything from baseball cards to prom corsages, miniatures of Michelangelo or Rodin sculptures, newspapers, jewelry, rosaries and dashboard Jesuses.
No, I have no idea what the technical solutions are. What kind of container can preserve paper and other perishables for a millennium, how deep the holes must be, but I keep thinking of the archeologists I have followed all my life. Their like will come again. They do the best they can at decoding the ancient civilizations of Egypt and the Maya. Do the hard work of trying to make it easy for them. Make sure your capsules contain English-Arabic dictionaries, English-Persian dictionaries, English-Russian dictionaries, English-Chinese dictionaries. Whatever it takes to communicate to the distant future. Work out how to give them a Rosetta Stone that shows them you and yours and ours.
That’s how we win in the long view. No matter how catastrophically we lose in the next decade or two.
Sorry. A dark rainy day and a recognition that the trench we’re in is filling mighty quickly with foul, death-poisoned water. We’ll be going over the top again in the morning, but for now give some thought to what I’ve said.
“Whoever you are, no matter how mundane you think your life is, get a blog or write a journal. Don’t think in terms of building an audience. Think of documenting the individual experiences of you and your family, what you think about them, what you believe, what you treasure from smallest to most life changing.”
I had actually been thinking about doing something just like this. You may have given me the last inspiration I needed. Might not be entertaining but it will certainly be informative for anyone from the future who may somehow stumble upon it.
On a side note, I will probably finish Luther Season 3 this weekend. Hope you and the missus have a good one.
I’m not responding in full here, but I’ll be thinking about the gritty technical aspects of this all weekend. The blog, yes, I need to start the record. But how to preserve it? I can’t continue to be stuck on the Internet, it’s so grid-dependent and the grid is actually quite fragile to threats both terrestrial and celestial.
My immediate vision, only a few years distant: 3d printing and engraving in hard plastic, guaranteed to outlast paper. Etching thousands of words with the electronic gadgets while we still have them. Using 3d printing to duplicate or pay tribute the things that moths and rust will destroy.
The long view indeed. I keep asking, but did you ever read Neal Stephenson’s Anathem? A culture that understood the long view. Inspired by the nonfiction Long Now project.
I hope RL will forgive me for posting this here, but it seemed too relevant to your comment not to post:
“The Plant printed Thad’s coffin, and you better believe we went over it with a fine-toothed comb before we presented it for stuffing. King Tut’s own sarcophagus didn’t get such a fuss made over it. It was a coffin for the ages, literally; the materials we used will probably outlast the human race by a handy margin. After the wake, the coffin would be interred in the very spot where Thad died, along the concrete walkway leading to the cathedral. It would be marked by a tall plastibaster obelisk that, according to Bess, should survive the coffin by a few hundred thousand years. The Snitz seemed to understand we were doing the best we could with the tools we had.”
Distillation of the core essences that constitute your intent. Etch this in stone and it will remain for ages.
You cannot outlast the Sun exploding or the fact that the Earth gets gobbled up by a black hole and eventually all the artifacts are erased. That is why or part of the reason why we pray to God – because our deeds are encoded in something that cannot be destroyed. That is why we are supposed to make good use of our time. Desperation is not holy; you are supposed to laugh or at least not weep. Actually, we are supposed to sing praises and be not afraid.
But we are afraid and angry. I mean spitting mad. Like you said in an earlier post it feels like we are being dragged over the edge by the momentum of the fools. I am desperate to avoid the doom so I think that by allowing enough bodies to pile up at the base I might survive the fall. I will be, of course, landing on a pile of dead and wounded.
They won’t be needing those nice shoes. They won’t be needing those nice clothes.
Barbarians? Or, more like post-apocalyptic know-nothings? One thing leads to another.
musical interlude:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JHYIGy1dyd8