History's prophecies can save the West

"Like disbalanced boulders, crushing before us many, Delicate springing things, whose plan it was to grow."

Edna St. Vincent Millay, American Poet(1892-1950)

If all else fails read the instruction manual: History!

"A diller, a dollar, A ten o'clock scholar, What makes you come so soon? You used to come at ten o'clock, But now you come at noon."— Nursery rhyme

How many historic re-confirmations are required before there is an awakening from the stupor of the West’s inevitable decline?

As times become more and more grim and war and chaos escalate we must turn away from our shock and grieving and start pursuing solutions. Even though the tyrants will not walk away from their tyrannies and lawlessness they are losing ground on every front as more and more they are the victims of their lies, wars and failed treacheries and ideologies. They are “kidults” suffering self-incrimination as they try to cover up their treacheries.

We are seeing the indelible cycles of history constantly in flux where everything is temporal and in passing. One very big reason we are in this mess is the despots of the West refuse to recognize their allotted time is past and their Hitlerian megalomania has been fully noted and opposing forces are coming to bear. What is good and moral often arrives late in the game and ultimately must come to prevail.

How often in life do we leap before we look and end up in a quagmire? How do things go so wrong and only then do we back track and read the instruction book. The more I read history the more I realize it is utterly prophetic telling our story as the habitual creatures we are, committing the same old atrocities over and over again. We are the hikers who walk into the dark woods without a compass or drinking water.

Of course the present is overwhelming but it is self-inflicted and no more than history unfolding as the past, present and future are one.

One of the first things tyrants must do is burn books, propagandize and intimidate as they must eradicate the truths of history to advance their despotism.

Historian’s and poets are among the great soothsayers who keep repeating the same prescient prophecies that go unheard and unread. There is nothing magical or mysterious in their ability to read the future. They are the analysts, the oracles, leading us to better futures and we the petulant children refusing to heed their diagnosises.

How would we feel if our doctors diagnosed our illness and then refused treatment, walking away in utter indifference? Politicians have become quacks not only are they incompetent diagnosticians their indifference to their responsibilities is child like as money, power, and privilege has infantalized them into a decadent aristocracy .

The white man has become the world’s Burden.

According to Rudyard Kipling in his poem of over a hundred years ago the “savages” of the world are The White Man’s Burden, though a hundred years later there has been role reversal as the utterly racist white man constitutes the greatest threat to world peace and security with our endless wars, plunder and pillage. The barbarians are within the gates wearing tailored suits desperately trying to justify their endemic racism, greed and megalomania at others expense.

History is the echo chamber where nobody is listening

When French historian Alexis de Tocqueville did his extensive tour of the USA in 1830 he noted the country had an embryonic obsession with power and wealth. This was seven years after the Munroe Doctrine was passed where the US declared its dominion over the Western hemisphere.

In 1922 Oswald Spengler published his best selling the Decline of the West.

In 1999 American historian Chalmers Johnson warned us America was collapsing for the same reasons the USSR collapsed.

These are only three samples of a barrage of literature critiquing Western civilization and we now exist in a state of arrested development where we are obsessed with the acquisition of money, power and privilege while ignoring and deliberately destroying our democratic systems. As it is, we have rendered ourselves as barbaric Philistinic cultures in precipitous decline, blaming and scapegoating others for our compulsive malfeasance.

How many reconfirmations are required before we restore a sane equilibrium?

For me history is an ever expanding jigsaw puzzle with new pieces constantly being added. It is like rolling a diamond in your hand where new facets catch our eye. It is the chain of evidence that detectives follow. It is our story being told.

It is not hard to come across the prose and poetry recording the crimes of the empire and the folly of mankind well recorded over many ages.

The poetry of American Poet Edna St. Vincent is but another confirmation. Too many decades ago she wrote :

We Have Gone too Far

We have gone too far; we do not know how to stop; impetus
Is all we have.  And we share it with the pushed Inert.

We are clever,– we are as clever as monkeys; and some of us
Have intellect, which is our danger, for we lack intelligence
And have forgotten instinct.

Progress– progress is the dirtiest word in the language- -who ever told us–
And made us believe it– that to take a step forward was necessarily, was always
A good idea?
In this unlighted cave, one step forward
That step can be the down-step into the Abyss.
But we, we have no sense of direction; impetus
Is all we have; we do not proceed, we only
Roll down the mountain,
Like disbalanced boulders, crushing before us many
Delicate springing things, whose plan it was to grow.

Clever, we are, and inventive,– but not creative;
For, to create, one must decide– the cells must decide– what form,
What color, what sex, how many petals, five, or more than five,
Or less than five.

But we, we decide nothing: the bland Opportunity
Presents itself, and we embrace it,– we are so grateful
When something happens which is not directly War;
For we think– although of course, now, we very seldom
Clearly think–
That the other side of War is Peace.

We have no sense; we only roll downhill.  Peace
Is the temporary beautiful ignorance that War
Somewhere progresses.

She also wrote her Epitaph for the Race of Man.

Millay, photographed by Carl Van Vechten, 1933

Epitaph for the Race of Man, V

When Man is gone and only gods remain
To stride the world, their mighty bodies hung
With golden shields, and golden curls outflung
Above their childish foreheads; when the plain
Round skull of Man is lifted and again
Abandoned by the ebbing wave, among
The sand and pebbles of the beach,–what tongue
Will tell the marvel of the human brain?
Heavy with music once this windy shell,
Heavy with knowledge of the clustered stars;
The one-time tenant of this draughty hall
Himself, in learned pamphlet, did foretell,
After some aeons of study jarred by wars,
This toothy gourd, this head emptied of all.{one of five stanzas}

Is it shocking to hear she has written our epitaph? She wrote it in the 1930’s as World War ll was looming large. Now we have sucked ourselves into greater wars, with greater consequences and now we again contemplate “This toothy gourd, this head emptied of all.”

About the same time W.H.Auden was writing:

In the nightmare of the dark
All the dogs of Europe bark,
And the living nations wait,
Each sequestered in its hate;

Intellectual disgrace
Stares from every human face,
And the seas of pity lie
Locked and frozen in each eye.

Eighty years later we are still “sequestered” in our hate and the “intellectual disgrace” is another pandemic.

Is this how the march of progress of mankind comes to an end?

Was writing our epitaph presumptuous on her part?

What purpose does it serve?