I get stuck in my dreams sometimes in history. Once, I was Roman, defending a building full of old statues that were gradually being covered with water. The burden of the past was immense. The Romans used to keep their family crest outside their homes, as a constant reminder of who they were.
Last night, I dreamed of both Sweden and Japan. Sweden felt like a congenial, comfortable place, well insulated from most of the pains of life felt in places like the United States. But it was gradually emptying. I saw a very nice mansion, that had held a zoo and many very interesting buildings, that had been abandoned. There was no one to live there.
Japan was being inundated with water. This of course echoes the very real tsunami most seem to have forgotten now outside Japan, but also echoes, I think, a cultural decline. The Japanese are disappearing. Their very rich and interesting culture is slowly vanishing into the undifferentiated mists of time now gone.
We always live in a burning moment of time, if we are living. The Present is eternal. It never tires or wears out. But WE do, as we attach ourselves to given forms/times.
As I see it, we are more or less condemned to dual identities in this world. We are spiritual beings, temporarily slowed down by the molasses in which we live, yet we feel the need to belong somewhere, in a society, in a family, in a place, in a time. But that form always passes; it must pass.
As I see it, we should now be thinking about the next ten thousand years. In my own detached, likely impersonal way, I see myself as existing in this moment, in this ephemeral world, tasked with figuring out how to create what good I can, where I am.
Hitler dreamed of a 1,000 year Reich. He spent his last days dreaming of the cities he wanted to build on the Soviet steppe, after killing most of the Slavs (root word of slave, remember) and enslaving the rest.
This dream was fantastically effecive, was it not? It was a coercion of history, a twisting of histories arm behind its back until it cried out in submission, where before there has only been chaos and fear. It answered the longing for order, for purpose. Hitler could predict the future because he intended to CREATE the future. He wanted a New Rome, which of course endured far more than a thousand years, if we count the Byzantine Empire, and the ROMAN Universal Church.
You cannot live more than a moment at a time, and this applies if you are a mayfly, condemned to hours of life; and if you are an eternal being, destined to live forever. Beyond this life, beyond time, perhaps that moment swells to occupy every possibility of awareness, of sensation, but here the task at hand is all we have.
We need to connect the worlds, in my view. As comfortable as Sweden is, it lacks a reason to continue living. This is the real underpinning of Conservatism, in my view: it does not look to politics for meaning, but rather looks to politics to PROTECT what meaning systems already exist. This is a crucial distinction.
But we can blend science and meaning. Where we need to start is by bringing the study of the after-life into the realm of mainstream university research. We further need to bring field conceptions of life back–they have been there before, and abandoned for not very good reasons–into the study of biology. We need to understand how we are all interconnected, and work on building what I suppose might be termed a social “moment”, an agreed upon place of rest and contemplation, into our shared dialogue.
As long as our thought leaders view death as a final extinction, they will continue to view the only source of continuing life to be a social arrangement that is permanent because coerced, by them.
Make no mistake: people like Al Gore and George Soros have abandoned traditional sources of metaphysical consolation. What they want is an enduring legacy imprinted on the foreheads of every living man, woman and child, that tells them who they MUST be. This is evil, and it must be fought. We have alternatives, and the fight will consist in vigorously pursuing them.