November 26, 2012
These days, anyone who opposes the idea of state-sanctioned gay marriage is deemed to be on “the wrong side of history.” But what if one day the whole idea of marriage is considered primitive and gay marriage is therefore viewed as nothing more than gay slavery?
Too often the progression of time and technology get conflated with moral and cultural progress. Civilizations rise and fall. History is cyclical rather than linear, and there’s no “right side” of a circle. The world’s Marxists and Hegelians have always deluded themselves that they can know the unknowable, that history’s trajectory is predestined, and that they”ve capably mapped it all out before it even happens.
A war’s victors rarely prove the righteousness of their cause, but they always prove that superior firepower rather than morality is what guides history. Who can honestly look at history (or nature) without concluding that it is amoral? Moral conclusions are things that humans impose on historical events. In the end, a stray asteroid may be the only thing that’s truly on the “right” side of global history, and it will have nothing to do with morality.
Tell someone who’s just been diagnosed with cancer that all change is good.
The next time you wish to conflate “new” with “good,” consider that the proliferation of AIDS among humans is relatively new.
Is it wrong to try and “turn back the clock” on a ticking time bomb?
In ever increasing measures, I see much more of value in the past than in the present or the future. It’s not due to some stubborn fealty to “my generation””I”m more fixated on the generations that preceded mine. I was afflicted with the Retro Impulse even before adolescence. In the early 1970s, my mind was lost amid the Marx Brothers” films of the 1930s. In the early 1980s, I”m reasonably sure I was the only male in Delaware County, PA, who wore a greasy pompadour and listened to Eddie Cochran and Gene Vincent. I stopped paying attention to Hollywood movies at some point in my mid-teens and can”t think of anyone in modern American cinema who’s within a thousand light years of Buster Keaton’s genius. And at every turn, I try and consciously cocoon myself from the toxic fast food that is modern American pop culture.
Being on the wrong side of history these days seems to mean “not being a one-worlder communist transgendered mulatto lesbian,” and I”m fine with that. The “advanced” areas are the ones with high taxes, high congestion, and high crime, so I find myself creeping out toward rural climes, where everyone is supposedly “backward.” I want no part of the dysgenic, doped-up anomie of our emergent dystopia filled with TV-addled sweatpants-swaddled creatures of inarticulation, where shortened attention spans and blunted analytical skills are somehow seen as signs of progress. History seems headed in the wrong direction, so I”m happy to be on the wrong side of it.
