Even the least educated among us knows something of ancient Egypt. For instance, there is a strain of Afro-centrism that insists the ancient Egyptians were black. They go through the list of pharaohs, pointing out how each one had distinctly African features. The “Hotep” thing grows out of this. The sort of people who attend a Juneteenth festival will have the word “Hotep” attached to them in some way. Black businesspeople will put this on their business card or website to signal to other blacks that they are down with the cause.
It is complete nonsense, of course, but the reason we know it is nonsense is the Egyptians preserved their past in memorials of stone, often filled with hieroglyphs so precise that we can know the exact order of their rulers, four thousand years after their time. The Egyptians were so careful preserving their dead rulers that we have fully intact mummies in our museums. Using modern science, we now know how they looked in life and how they fit into the emerging genetic mosaic of the human family.
The Egyptians had a strong sense of time and their place in the historical timeline. Time was an important part of Egyptian culture. They had crude water clocks and a surprisingly good calendar. Memorializing the dead has only one purpose and that is so future generations know their past and their place in the timeline. The Egyptians put so much effort into preserving their past is they naturally assumed they had a future. The names and deeds of those who came before them would have use to those in the future.
In contrast, the Dorians burned their kings, as well as any record of them. Other than a few references here and there in later Greek writing, we do not know the names of their kings. They did not see any reason to preserve this information because they lived in the moment. The past was meaningless, because the future was meaningless to them. Even in the age of Aristotle, the Greeks could not know if Leucippus, the man credited with inventing Atomism, was a real person or the dates of his life.
The Cult that rules over us has forever lectured against the past, claiming that it is what prevents us from reaching the glorious future. The future is never defined, it is just assumed, but the past is full of a detailed list of monsters. The rage-heads, running around defacing statues and demanding people named “Jefferson” change their names, are not making detailed arguments about who should and should not be memorialized. These are not people with a sense of the past. They are raging against the ideas of having a past.
The proof of this is they quickly moved from rebel flags to Confederate statuary to pretty much every white man who is now dead. There are calls to rename Disney World because old Walt was a Jew hater. The Red Sox are trying to erase the name of the man who founded the franchise. Tom Yawkey was a man of his age and racist by modern standards, but so was every other human on earth just a few years ago. The rage-heads are erasing the name, not the man, because they simply want to erase the past.
Returning to the Greeks, they have an expression that is important to keep in mind while the rage virus runs through our society. “A Society grows great when old men plant trees in whose shade they know they shall never sit.” The opposite of that is true. What we are seeing today is barren young women cutting down memorials because they remind them of the fact, they have no future. The high presence of infertile women in these mobs is suggestive. One day, the cat will die and they will be alone.
It is this ahistorical nature of the American Left that is at the root of this incoherent and pointless violence. The Left organized a great PR campaign in response to Charlottesville, but they threw it all away in an orgy of violence over the last week. The reason is they are locked into the moment, a moment bound on all sides by a rage against nature. They cannot think about how today’s action will be viewed tomorrow, because there is no tomorrow for these people. All that matters is the catharsis.
Men have always contemplated their place in the timeline. The Irish used to say that the past is a nightmare from which they never awake. This was, of course, in relation to the troubles. Faulkner had Quentin Compson, his character in The Sound and the Fury, obsess over his family’s past, which was a stand in for the Old South. The Compson family was the emblem of the old, post Civil War South. Quentin finally smashes his pocket watch, a family heirloom, snapping off the hands, before he drowns himself in the Charles River.
That is the end for the Cult of Modern Liberalism. What has kept it going for generations was an easy to find collection of devils against which they could rally the true believers in a great cause. They have run out of devils and now they are digging up old graves, in an effort to bring back devils from the past. This rage will end in a great fire onto which they throw the old culture of America. Finally, when they have burned the last of it, they will throw themselves on the pyre, perhaps with some help from the rest of us.
