http://www.anthropoetics.ucla.edu/ap1002/amalek.htm

It sounds to me like your daughter has a pretty wise dad. But studying history when you’re young is always a bit of a problem. You can’t really get what it is all about until you’ve lived a while and received some knocks.

My belief however is that all studies of the human that are not purely physiological or neurological, should be historical studies. But even historians would find such an idea difficult to follow. We so much rely on abstract all-purpose metaphysics, detached from any specific context, to tie the ideas in our heads together. But as you suggest, to depend on this kind of ahistorical thinking is to move away from any revelation of what it is all about. The revelation must always be tied to our experience of a specific event or moment.

What is constant in human beings is their biological nature, and, the minimal or original basis of the problem that was there at the start when they had to stop being animals and start becoming human. But every historical situation is a somewhat new problem and it has to find a new solution to reproduce the spontaneous effect of the original solution.

I share your faith we will always be able to do this. And I don’t think we are completley in the dark about what this entails. Every generation gets, implicitly or explicitly, a bit wiser about our humanity, I think. At least, they are able to work more freedoms into their social systems, which in turn makes more complex problems, which requires of them both more reason and spirituality (it is a big mistake of many to pit rationality against spirituality; you can’t grow one without the other).

While I have no experience with raising kids, I’m sure it must be damn hard knowing what to teach them. Oftentimes thinking like everyone else is the safest course to take. Encouraging them to develop their own minds is a dangerous proposition. But if that is the direction they are taking, I suppose you just have to make sure they are motivated more by love than resentment in their quest to understand what it is all about.

Good luck.

It’s now dawning on her that her own culture is, or was until very recently(think GWoT), exceptional in the extreme degree to which it has been ‘free from history’; that outside our consciousness there is this exotic universe, moored to the origin of humanity, that has now come so vividly back into the future. I think it makes her–and frankly her dad too–feel a little white-bread, a little thinly-drawn on the human template.

Paradox again, who’s the immigrant? Most of us Texas scandanavians can trace back only as far as a great grampaw who jumped ship in Houston to get in on the new rice-farming biz. So we have this alien awe regarding these vasty historical place/times, with their deeply-felt religion-as-nature constancy trailing back into the past (and thereby creating significance, which surely can’t hurt the needful adding of depth to a ‘present’ flattening under the irony of collectivist solipsism; AKA PoMo-ism, UN-ism, anti-Semite/Israel/America/Jesusland-ism, etcetera on down to the belly of the beast, the jihad-international UnGod).

21 yr olds will wrestle with these things, and if dad listens, he’ll be wrestling again too. I think the only thing I’ve learned that might be of value to her–or to any of the kids–is that studying history from the heart is to engulf oneself in echo, to be flabbergasted by the volume of the unrevealed, and the cold realization that mankind’s enemy now is the same old enemy from the beginning. But everything has a corollary, and whatever has brought humankind through the past will take us also through the future. Unless we quit doing our part. Our part, whatever it is, may as well be to not understand where we are, as it may be TO understand where we are. Who knows? So, anyway, SORRY about this ramble-off-into-nowhere post, must be the amphetamines, smoke ‘em if ya got ‘em!

Thanks for the links. Buddy, I’m not completely sure what you mean by postmodernism getting redder. Do you mean more bloody dangerous? Anyway, if you feel need to move forward and get in touch with the more spiritually sound esthetic that is coming along after postmodernism, I would highly recommend some essays by Raoul Eshelmann dealing with what he calls “performatism”. You can find them in the free online journal, Anthropoetics, at http://www.anthropoetics.ucla.edu (I promise I will learn to do HTML links soon.) I especially like his essay on recent Berlin architecture because it is full of photos and you can really see what he is getting at.

The PoMo ideal in contrast is fluorescent, bright, completed, fashionable, theatrically cathartic on secularism, faithfully self-referential, and with no transcending ‘other’ to anticipate, spiritually cold, affectless, passive and flat. The British shopkeeper who was never anti-semitic before 911 has now been on steady MSM PoMo antiwar feed for a few straight years now. Effects accumulate, if not cognitively then as exhaustion of the will to contend: “GWoT perpetual, western mavericks must assimilate”. Dhimmitude is no worse than “Dictatorship of the Proletariat”(the incoherence is invisible in the brightness of the beauty). “Come and look at the future. See? It is so calm. So restful.” Somehow PoMo seems to be getting redder all the time. Is it just me?

“Terrorism is designed to achieve

maximum publicity and to manipulate public revulsion so that pressure is put on the

leaders of the democracies to surrender. It cannot be said too often that what drives al

Qaeda is not the exercise of disproportionate force by the west but the perception of its

weakness and incapacity or unwillingness to fight in its own defence. But even al Qaeda

must surely have been taken aback by the craven willingness of the British media to fall

into line by abusing and persecuting their own leaders at a time of war. These terrorists

know that the more barbaric their acts, the more hysteria and pressure the British media

will direct at Blair and Bush. So al Qaeda has every incentive to ratchet up the atrocities.

Thatís why the hostage Kenneth Bigley was videoed sobbing for his life in a cage; and the

media duly do what the terrorists want and put it on their front pages and news bulletins,

and the pressure on Blair to split from America becomes more and more intolerable.

“The appalling result of all this is that, if a terrorist outrage in London were to claim the

lives of hundreds or thousands of people, the reaction of many Britons might not be a

revival of the spirit of the Blitz and an iron determination to defeat fascism and tyranny. It

might be instead to turn on Tony Blair and blame him directly for bringing about the

slaughter. And that, of course, is precisely what makes such a terrible outcome more

likely. There can be little doubt that al Qaeda, such a shrewd judge of western decadence

and the differences in moral fibre between the countries of the west, will have noted the

fact that in Britain, the worse the terrorist outrage that is committed, the more the public

will turn on Tony Blair. Every single defeatist, distorted or dishonest article about Iraq,

Israel and the war on terror makes another barbaric atrocity more likely.”