There is no teleology to history. Nothing is preordained except entropy and death … and as long as there is life, rebirth too, and resurrections and reinventions.
At my age, history seems like white hot lava streaming downhill across uneven ground.
We give events their pattern. We look at those cross-sections of landscape and flow from 5000 feet up, at the gutters and gullies it takes, the cities it consumes, the single houses it circumvents, at the refugee columns it creates, at the ones who risk everything to muster others to build walls to direct its flood away and protect life. Then we say, “This is what it means.”
Let me know when you find an ideology that tucks that shambles into tidy explanations. This is a declaration, I guess …… wait, no, more a working out of a principle.
I distrust all ideologies, all dogmas, all secular articles of faith.
What counts for me is independence of mind and heart. Not isolation, not a faux-Olympian perspective, but the freedom to think for myself against the pressure to conform to any type of fashionable idea whether of the left or right. I am against purity of thought or those who seek to proclaim that their perspective is the most authentic, the flawless path, the most fair of all the land. I am for the freedom of imagination.
I am for clarity of thought and writing and against jargon and cant. I am for logic and questioning. I am for curiosity. I am for novels and theater and poetry because they make the leap of imagination into the individual lives of others compelling and morally necessary. I am for the reading of history because it helps me to sort and make sense of what I see in the present. I am for human beings and against machines that destroy them — corporate machines, media machines, military machines. Machines of overweening power and arrogance that grind up human beings into powder or reduce them to serfs or make caricatures of them or push them into tribes. I am for looking into the eyes of the person sitting across from me and listening to him or her. I am for the underdog, the powerless, the beset, the refugees, the ones who are murdered, the ones who track down the murderer. I am for animals and forests and wilderness and parks and gardens and any small sanctuary set aside from the relentless pursuit of money.
I am for the individual conscience that sets out each day in the roughhouse turbulence, horror and grace of the world and tries to stay true to a life-affirming code.
