What One Sees

The myths a people tell are of great interest to anyone seeking to understand them. The same can be said of their symbols. Both build on an unspoken set of common ideas and history to give them their emotional power. Few would look in awe at Massadah if one did not understand the degree to which Roman Pagan rule offended the religious ideas of the ancient Jews and the glory attached to those who fight to the death.

The dusty chains of ancient slaving ports off the coast of Africa evoke powerful emotions among most non- African Blacks because it their culture and frequently their ancestors who were brought out of Africa as slaves. It is in that memory of their own slavery that they look upon such chains with horror. It is their interest in their own pasts or memories that drives one perception of History. Surely the slave routes overland were far more horrific than those by sea but so few survived and reproduced after the land treks that no Black culture was formed by them to lament their suffering.

So in seeing the symbol of such maritime shackles, one can see an image of the past and into the preoccupations of a group. The same can be said of Americans in general. The Western movie featuring one lone hero (or more recently the term protagonist removes any concept of the star being a good person) against the forces of either corruption or a staid order. The theme of the individual shaping society and being beyond its reach is a popular one in American culture. The theme of the "hip" young or tough people shaking up a conformist society is one that almost echoes the image of the American revolution fighting the Monarchist order.

While such an image is grossly misrepresentative, there is some justification by such an image for the individualist approach taken by some people. This is rarely if ever a conscious decision or idea but simply one of the many ideas that are beneath conscious thought that yet shape our judgements. Other societies that have less individualist myths tended to celebrate larger groups of protagonists in their myths and films. The complexity of keeping track of all of the characters in Anna Karenina is daunting while the difficulty in doing so for the latest thriller off the airport bookshelves is not even a task.

The focus of many other myths is the community or the group. In Anglo-American tradition, it is usually the individual. This is by no means an absolute standard as there are variations. One sees a definite focus on the individual in the Odyssey by supposedly the same author as the more social Iliad. Blinding the Cyclops thus carries great symbolism to those who know the myth.

It is also easy to take the reading of a mind through symbols too rigidly. Some read into the symbols on US dollar bills signs of a secret conspiracy noting the eye and pyramid. What a better understanding of history would have told them was that the growing popularity of "Ancient" and "Mystical" orders usually only a few decades old flourished who made up their supposedly passed down ancient secrets. The most popular was the Masons.

They made up most most of their symbols and appropriated others from less than classical times. The pyramid with eye was one of the symbols they made up. How did it pass to the US dollar? It comes from the popularity of such societies in both Europe and America among the more radical minded people. Masons in Europe were generally very anti-clerical and the Catholic (and other ) Churches tried to crush the radical organizations. This hostility is one of the key origins of the hostility many people simply inherited towards the Masons. In America, the organizations were lightly less antagonistic towards the Church but they were still the meeting houses of radical social reformers.

Such men are naturally attracted to revolutions and the American revolution was no exception although Masonic lodges were split on the subject. Leading members of the more radical wing of the American Revolution were Masons and they decided to adorn their new country with their symbols. Their influence pretty much stopped there as their other goals were quite overt but opposed by a strong faction of opponents who did not like the socially transformative plans of Jefferson et al.

So in looking at such a symbol of America as its currency, once can take the magnifying glass of history and see the political struggles of so long ago. That streak of radicalism and idealism is not gone from American life. While politics may shift frequently, other cultural ideas are more enduring and so the symbols are still clues the minds of their users.

Historical Alzheimers

First of all, a joyous Christmas.

I am routinely amazed and irritated by the supposed "best and brightest" of Western society. This is not so much the semi-aristocratic divisions they make but the degree of culture and competence of those making the distinctions.

One easily gets fed up with entire fields when respected people in them make very simple mistakes. James Barber wrote a book in which one example was the refusal of Herbert Hoover to institute welfare policies. This is galling as economic historians have seen that he did institute several such policies as well as those favoring unions and the like. The historians in favor of such policies praise him for his foresight and those opposed revile him for bringing on or aggravating the Great Depression. The only place where one finds the claim that Hoover did not intervene in the economy is in the electoral propaganda of Franklin Delano Roosevelt who tried to present himself as a radical transformer of the economy and society compared to Hoover.

This was not hard to find but nonetheless the claim remains in the most recent version of his textbook that has for many decades been taught in University classes. The simplicity of such a mistake indicates a failure to research properly. Sadly, this is not the only case. In studies of international relations, long papers have been written about the impact of air power on diplomacy but then fail to note major land offensives. A little common sense and memory would have avoided such blunders but they are made by "respected" people who are not questioned on what contradicts common sense and precedent.

I certainly believe that some division between the cultured and educated compared to the less civilized. The cultured core can exert its influence and guide a society and preserve the norms, direction, and preserve ideas and learning beyond daily stresses and collapses. Nonetheless, as education means less and less in the West, the ability to assess such a privileged position is oriented not around contribution to society but around alternatively wealth or ideological objectives.

Gone are the days when a student was expected to learn the classics, the great wars of the Greeks, Romans, and others. Through such studies, an understanding of a complex situation with real human actors and intents is formed. Now, the recipe approach to History results in such normal and human interactions being reduced to a simple formula that almost never captures even the basic situation. The quality of modern Western political discourse when invoking History gives the same effect as seeing The Merchant of Venice reduced to an episode of the Simpsons (worse exists but I have never watched such shows hence the lack of a more apt comparison) with the vocabulary of supposedly educated men being reduced to what most children surpass in primary school.

There are several factors that I can find for now.
The lack of memory is a crippling problem in any analysis. One may compare a situation to WWII. Many people resort to a Munich Analogy but the validity of a comparison also depends on the similarities between the situation and WWII. One notorious example is many describing the 1991-1995 Bosnian war as a relapse of WWII. That is not far from the truth. The suspicions and goals of all three groups evolved primarily from WWII and all three sides invoked images and ideas from WWII in bother their domestic and international propaganda (often taking place in Bosnia but aimed at foreigners). The problem was that the lack of memory (ie. remembering that Croats and Muslims hade predominatly been allied to Nazi Germany and commited a very entheusiastic genocide against Serbs and Jews) meant that the similarities blamed Serbs for being supposedly the revival of Naziism wheras others with a longer attention span remembered the dubiousness of certain claims.

If you cannot remember data, your theories may be perfect but your result will be wrong due to insufficient or false input. Nonetheless, the whole cult of "self-development" and modernism scorn memory. This is also applicable in the small scale. I learned the Pi number at the behest of my father and since first grade have been noted for a good memory and making connections otherwise impossible without a better grasp of multiple things at once. LTGEN Ion Mircea Pacepa was taught to memorize the phone book and as a result could recal events from years ago providing him with valuable information much more easily.

Such a poor memory results in a strengthening of the bias in favor of immediate circomstances. If one has barely learned of the Punic Wars or of Celtic human sacrifice, it is much harder to formulate arguements against Neo-Paganism when they claim Paganism was kinder than Judaism or Christianity. In many cases, people simple buckle out of a lack of information leading to an inability to formulate an arguement.

The blind narcissism is the worst aspect. The human mind naturally endeavors to protect its ego and so subtly misinterpets things in its favor. The direct approach of building self-esteem has resulted in a habit of approaching History as a cookbook (why do I need to study it?) or as a morality play in which they are the hero (the habit of fighting WWII over again in completely unrelated circomstances) and as a result, such things badly distort History. The cult for understanding can also be subborned into "understanding" such peoples as the Indian allies of France in their wars against the British. Such studies simply are sympathetic portrayals that try to hide the massacres such allies commited against British settlers in an attempt to create an image of the author rising above the conflicts of the past. The result is instead a different kind of distortion but even less respectful of the people of the time.

In short, I hate the idiots of the Western intellegentsia. At least the function as a repositiory of ideas is still handled by the status of those who protect such ideas is in the isolated counter-establishment.