We are past the point of a human history. History, of course, was always human, in that it recorded the legacy of humanity and little else. Even ecologically recorded phenomena were crafted in relation to the environmental landscape of humanity at the time. The flood for instance, all evidence for such an event intrinsically tie with the human project--that of storytelling and of religion. Can there be a history without a humanity?
Science might content to step into the arena here. It is, after all, the "objective man's" choice of poison. Science proposes many pre-histories, one which predate the emergence of humanity into the world. It studies the cosmos and the evolution of celestial bodies from billions of years ago; at times, it even predicts the future, the collapse of the sun, the loss of entropy at the end of the universe, all events certain to take place after the stint of humanity of the stage of der Welt. But all these remain theories. Of course, the word "theory" means something very different in the scientific language game. Gravity is a theory, evolution is a theory, in essence, all of science is a theory which allows for the skepticism of a null hypothesis. But science is its own language, and it means something very different when speaking of history too.
The Greek ἱστορία and the Latin historia both contain the notion of a narrative, of a recorded tale and story. If extrapolated through the inherited English history of the word--through the Old French estoire--we arrive at the grand finale, history as the overarching narrative of humanity. Now we reach the problem of conceptualisation.
There are many school of thought in this modern narrative. Those closely related to Hegel might see history as a sequence of events moving towards some ultimate conclusion, the ideal of progress, the achievement of advanced human freedoms. This Idealist lens not only gives agency to the flow of history--it is following a preordained, even religious path to the freedom or redemption of humanity--it also removes the human element. Now, history is a funxional system within itself which moves regardless of human axion and intervention.
In part, this final conclusion is justified. Consider the typical thought experiment: what if X person was to be transported or born in the modern day, in the Neu, how might X react? Let us take Goethe, exempli gratia. If Goethe were to be born into modern day, there would no longer be a modern day. Without his contribution in our history, the path taken would drastically shift and the world would not be the same. In essence, this is true for any individual. Because der Welt and history at large exist as such a large chain of immanence, and break in the positive reinforcement of perceived causality would change the direxion of future cause and eliminate potential difference. Not only is this true, but the premise of the thought is in itself absurd. To remove anyone, Goethe again, from the environment which initially birthed the individual, the individual is no longer the same. Each loop must be repeated with exact precision to produce a replica, and there is no repetition in the narrative, only reflexions of past loops of experience.
So, this brings us to the question of history? If the scientific language presents a different term to the traditional meaning of this abstraxion, what is that traditional meaning? History is the ever unfolding narrative of humanity; the tale of our past and future. But something strange has happened in the modern conscious. We have lost control of this narrative. It no longer belongs to us. Human history is dead.
The time of the Neu, more than any past epoch or loop, is a time of systems. A time where humanity has taken a backseat to our creations and it is now our job as gods to observe our creation coolly.
The history of the Neu is that of the machines, the systems, the monuments we have built. Textbooks talk about the founding of America or modern France not in the language of individuals or groups, but in the appraisal of ideals and ideologies. The situation of the modern world does not owe any degree of anger to people like Reagan, Thatcher, Friedman or Maynard Keynes, we instead turn to the daemon of Neoliberalism, of Monopoly and Financial Capitalism. There are no longer puppet masters standing in the shadows pulling the strings, the systems live for themselves, interact with each other, and form history independent of human interaxion, but a single ideal, one from the traditional conception of history remains, that of progress.
If we take the Humanist position--a dubious one at best--history begins with the emergence of man, whether through sentience or instinct, the moment humanity stepped out of the dark cave and decided to conquer the world. For practical reasons, history begins with Thucydides, Livy, Herodotus and Sima Qian. These early recorders understood their rôle as storytellers. To that respect, and in the grand mythologising sense, we might also include Moses. Not yet, except for in the Judeo-Christian framework, does the idea of inevitable progress exist. There is yet to be invented an end goal to history. But through growing interest in record keeping and more advanced technologies for recording, an idea of progress will emerge.
In truth, "progress" as history conceives it, does exist. It is the drive for this understanding of history. Each new technology, both physical and ideological, pushes the forward momentum of the species. But progress is not a moral thing, it is an amoral entity within the world that looks down on the human race and asks if this is the right direxion.
Progress, and her marriage partner History, are pawns of technology; or rather, they share in the polygamy of cause and effect, deteriorating both into an acausality. And technology, is always in business with war.
To prescriptively give humanity any "nature" is an act of super self-importance and presupposes knowledge outside of the frame of life and phenomena, as if one could see into their own soul, as if one were a poet experiencing the Emersonian translucent eyeball and staring into the depth of oneself, into natura, but without the knowledge that this is a jaundiced eye. All our eyes are yellow with deceit! The only nature applicable to humanity is a descriptive type--and even these should be only used for sake of example.
If, looking back on Sir History, we are to descry an arcane element which does not change with human existence--a flaw in itself, because there is nothing which does not change--then the element of human nature would be "war".
From the day of man to the birth of society, war has ran through the lifeblood of the narrative at every level. There is always a reason to dominate another, whether as a show of strength or an appropriation of resources. And since the invention of early systems, those of country, economy, city and peoples, war has only become more appealing.
But there is another true to war. It is a taxing endeavor. It can cost life, resources, it can level and destroy cities and cultures, and most importantly, being a system itself, it could complete its goal and cease to exist. War, like all systems, is a mega-process, a collation of machine and sub-processes, and like all processes, it seeks subsistence; its existence is an existence with the intent to continue to exist. If a war is successful, or more so, if a war is painfully unsuccessful, it threatens to never happen again. Enter the coconspirators, Progress and technology.
Progress is the child of War, as Ἔρως was the son of Poros and Penia. War needed to invent Progress, needed a means to keep warfare alive, and in turn came technology.
Each technology, each step of Progress, makes war more manageable, makes it proliferate beyond bounds, increases the civilisation and doubles the need for war. For Rome, this became so extreme of a cycle that a base for the society needed to be built on warfare, and it became a pillar in social, economic and political spheres. And Rome is hardly an exception.
From the innovation of Progress, the subsistence of warfare, history was born. Should it surprise us that early histories, those of Livy and Herodotus are the history of battles and military campaigns? Are these not the greatest markers of progress?
When sacked by a foreign tribe, you build walls to protect your city. When your rivals venture near again, they build catapults and trebuchets as a means to conquer the walls. To increase defense, you built a moat. To counteract, they build a boat, or a bridge.
Look at the greatest large-steps of technology across the epochs. Look at how all of them were devices for war! For Progress! Fire could burn enemies, could light darkness, could cook food and keep soldiers going. The wheel could quickly transport soldiers or goods, could create machines meant to topple walls or move troops across great distances. Gunpowder could be used to create killer projectiles which would destroy equally walls and people. The compass could guide troops to the next location. Maps could place enemies spatial position, could help to plan an invasion or to better control troops. Paper could be used to record treaties, or History of battles for means of better strategising, it could be used, like in Sunzi, to highlight a philosophy of battle. The printing press allowed for paper usage on a mass scale, communication between troops and entities engaged in battle, as seen also with the telegraph and telephone. The steam engine re-revolutionised the innovations of the wheel, allowing for more transport and power in the sense of growing weapons. Electricity and the lightbulb brought a higher degree of fire into the world, now it could be controlled for specific lighting and could help to guide the armies. The aeroplane was not invented for transport, that was a secondary need, it came into existence under the necessity of Progress, under the contract she made with war. The internet, computers, phones, mass media? All piece used in the now information driven world of warfare, to control the narrative, to improve communication, to kill in a more "humane" way, and this brings us to the question of Progress? If Progress is war, or serves that master, then why do the moralists and essentialist, those same people who hold to religion and to Hegel as history reaching a zenith, view Progress as ethically "good".
I make no prescription here. It would be frivolous. The world is hardly "good" or "evil", rather it exists and we impose these values onto it. But Progress is destructive. Not only in the sense of technological developments--we can now kill more people than ever in history in record time, and frequently showcase such a fact in Imperial Periphery nations--but in the denigration of the human soul.
As with ethics, I make no metaphysical prescription to the essence of humanity, or the physicality of some separate entity, I mean only to examine the spirit of a person. And that spirit has been poisoned. No longer do we question state sanxioned death, not because we have reached some immoral enlightenment, but because it has become clean, it is the victim of Progress. Gone are the guillotines and firing squad. Instead we have gas chambers and lethal injexions; quiet and painless approaches which let us push these individuals out of mind and into the world of simulation. War, in its classical sense, is now entertainment. Not only do we see reenactment of it in film, glorifying the heroism and extremity of the situation--it was Truffaut who claimed "There is no such thing as an anti-war movie"--but we see live demonstrations of it on mass media, literal voyeurisms of the terror. But it's clean. We know the sides, those same instruments of mass media have told us who is "good" and who is "bad", but more importantly, they have framed these events behind a shielded screen, where we can feel engaged without ever having to engage. As the Iraq war was a prime example of Baudrillard's Simulations.
And in the war as well, in the front lines. There is no more close encounters, soldiers pointing spears or guns at each other and looking deeply into their jaundiced eyes. We have drones for that. We have automatic rifles and snipers which can engage with the enemy from miles away at times. We may not even see or ever know who we are fighting, and it's certain we'll never know WHY we're doing it. That is the decree of the system, the one without masters. It's the perpetual rolling of History.
One with less of a stomach for critique might call such a phenomena "desensitisation". We are too removed from the terror we create to grasp its magnitude. But this is not a matter of being desensitised. There are plenty of individuals who would grasp it if they were to engage in a real battlefield. It's instead a matter of technological simulation and of comfort. The world is made easier for us, we move one step closer to the Hegel idea of absolute freedom, or absolute pleasure, if we fail to engage with these events. They benefit us directly, but the greatest benefit is the ability to treat them as "un-real".
Perhaps it is time for us to revaluate History and Progress, and to question if the system which now control the narrative of humanity should be in such a position. It is impossible to escape from the deterministic cybernetic loops we have established, but it might be possible to become more human in the inhuman expanse.
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