Past is Present
In response to Bill’s letter of May 20th in which he restates that the Bible contains 27 percent predictive material, I must point out that history is not science. Histories are aesthetic narratives; they are not scientific investigations into the existence of matter. They are two different types of writing; they will never be joined together or healed over. They are permanently different.
We tend to think that history is written in stone and that it is unchanging and immutable. But history is a continuing dialogue between the past and the present. The past is not discovered or found; it is created by the historian as a narrative which is read by an audience. History is more invented than found.
Simply stated, history varies by country and even by individual; communist countries have histories which are different from democratic nation’s histories. Muslims and Christians have different histories of God. In contrast, the entire world knows that H2O is water and a meter is 1/299,792,458 of the distance light travels in a vacuum in one second. Airplanes from one country can land in another country because of accepted air-travel conventions. Science is universal, religion is regional at best.
The break between modern times and past times is epochal and they have become different worlds of thought; the world will never go back to the mentality of 2,000 years ago and re-establish itself based on ancient ideas. Al-Qaida or ISIS may take pot-shots at the Western world but it is folly to think an Islamist state could be imposed upon America.
Christianity was born in the fourth century A.D. as Emperor Constantine favored Christianity only after 300 years of barely licit and mostly illicit existence. Islam was invented about 1,200 years ago from some misshapen ideas about Judaism, Christianity, and Zoroastrianism.
The attempt to find the real past, to find an objective past with accounts which are accurate and even true is piling assumption upon assumption. This allows doubt to run, clearly affecting what one thinks about history, and forces one to admit that history can be anything you want it to be and poses the real question of how specific histories came to be shaped, not by evidence, but by methodology and ideology and the narrative itself.
In short, all history is created and all stories are fiction and that includes histories.
Greg Blinn, Kelseyville
Concerns over Dollar General
Recently I attended a Town Hall Meeting in Kelseyville. The purpose of the meeting was to discuss the impact the proposed Dollar General Store would have on the community of Kelseyville. I would like to share a brief summation of the concerns expressed.
While a few considered this to be an opportunity to shop without going out of town, most felt that this would not be the sort of business a small town like Kelseyville would like to bring in. As this store sells items that are already available in our local businesses, there were concerns that the competition would likely cause our few small retailers to suffer, possibly go out of business. In addition, since the profits from this chain store would go out of the state, the local economy would not be gaining much.
The proposed site is directly across from the high school, leading many to worry about the impact of increased traffic, congestion, and pedestrian safety. Delivery trucks negotiating the already crowded streets, especially during school days, would have to be addressed.
Kelseyville has worked very hard to establish its character, striving to maintain the feeling of a small country town. The idea of a chain store arriving in the town does not fit that vision. The effect of the arrival of other chain stores in the county can be seen by the empty storefronts, buildings that once housed a bookstore, a clothing store, a gift store among others.
There will be a hearing in regards to this matter on Thursday, May 28, at 9:45 in the Board of Supervisors Chambers. I would encourage you to attend.
Peggy Robertson, Kelseyville
Ecce Humanitas
During World War One the governments of France and Germany supplied each other strategic war materials with the object of keeping the astronomically profitable conflict (for military industry) in progress, committing, thereby, mass murder for money on a mastodonic scale (see “Days of Our Years,” by Pierre van Paassen, pages seventy through seventy-seven). The conflict was also astronomically destructive of human life; for hundreds were dying every day in the muddy, blood-soaked trenches between France and Germany. Soldiers were becoming scarce; it became necessary to conscript mere boys and old men. Still dreading the loss of the unprecedented wealth they were reaping by their contraband commerce, they managed to reject every proffered plan to end the war.
Reading of this unthinkable crime, I realized no common construct of crime and punishment could encompass its dreadful iniquity. If the murder of one man for money would get a murderer twenty years in prison, punishment would not answer here. These ultra-murderers were of the class accustomed to administer punishment to others. They were respected in their communities; no type of punishment would reform these decent and honest citizens. They were as good as people get. If the violent deaths of tens of thousands of innocent victims did not wake remorseful sympathy in these killers, then remorse was not there to wake. Their inconceivable crime had to be due not to evil intent, but to a gap in the genetic makeup of human kind. However, by a reactionary transformation, later evolution of humanity engulfed this lacuna and made it indispensable to the survival of human life.
Those satiate of war, in control of tremendous wealth (which transmutes to power), are accommodated by a militant ideology fostered by interest in competitive sports in which victory is achieved by physical violence (e.g.: football, soccer, ice hockey). Such national attitude assures an automatic pro-combat stance toward international dissidence, which, as everyone knows, is certain, sooner or later, to occur. The effect of militant propaganda on such a public mindset gets a ready reaction; war is approved, affecting the most painful deaths imaginable for innocent thousands dying for unknown reasons in behalf of both nations, a grotesque slaughter which could have been avoided by the employment of half the polemic discussion expended on the adoption of a county’s disputed budget.
The part of human genetic structure purged by natural selection in the ubiquitous insufficiency here under discussion was the part essential to man’s assessment of himself, the part that allowed self-consciousness, daydreaming and introversion. It was also the part that allowed one’s imagination to focus on sympathy for others who were not related in any way close to one. Its destruction was effected by disuse, for the dangers to which all animal life was subject during its early evolution were so imminent and so destructive that any creature that let its attention stray from exterior conditions was soon killed and eaten. The millions of years that encompassed man’s early evolution were plenty of time for mutants due to genetic recombination to appear who lacked the genes necessary for this introspective behavior, and these fortunate mutants began a new, self-concerned, unfeeling variety of the human species. Adaptation to this modified genetic ensemble entailed a sharp increase in disagreements between individuals, such that every critical problem impacting society drew a plurality of options for solution, greatly increasing the chances of finding a successful solution and without which the human species would not have survived to the present day.
Virtue is an invention of man alien to his inescapable animalism; personal advantage is his ultimate impulsion. It might sanctify him somewhat to try to endow him, a la Kant, with a sense of duty by ubiquitous placarding and constant broadcasting of purificatory petitioning, as is allegedly done to advantage in Japan.
To hope natural selection will integrate genes for empathic sympathy is vain; for that would entail the attempt to embody favorable premarital mortality, or a favorable mate selection; and the unfeeling would probably have more money and thus the marital advantage.
The hope for man lies quiescent in his being at once the worst and best of all Earth’s creatures. Given this, we can hope man will someday mature culturally past his childish unquenchable desire to get all the money in the world.
Dean Sparks, Lucerne
