tdaxp

Commentary on Robb's Op-ed," by Thomas Barnett, Thomas P.M. Barnett :: Weblog, 15 October 2005, http://www.thomaspmbarnett.com/weblog/archives2/002471.html.

History is What Happens When the MSM is Busy Covering Other News," by Gagdad Bob, One Cosmos, 15 October 2005, http://onecosmos.blogspot.com/2005/10/history-is-what-happens-when-msm-is.html (from Larwyn).

Hypercube, by Stefan Krobath

Remember, super-empowered individuals can rule vertical scenarios temporarily, but it takes states, and all their resources, to rule horizonatal ones. In short, don't confuse disruption capacity with rule-making capacity. To believe the former rules all is to engage in what that battle-tested revolutionary, V.I. Lenin, called the child-like belief that the right bomb in the right place at the right time changes everything. Modeling ourselves on OBL's and Al Qaeda's infantilism isn't the answer. Building the bigger open-source net is. This is my A-to-Z rule set on processing politically bankrupt states.

In many ways, Fukuyama was simply updating the classical liberal idea of history. It may be contrasted with the post-modern view of historical meaninglessness, which in turn, is actually similar to primitive cosmologies, which either view the cosmos as a cyclical process of “eternal return,” or as a degenerate process of departure and increasing distance from an idyllic past. Only with the Hebrew approach to history did mankind begin to discern a “direction” in history, and with it, a sense of history’s purpose. That is, for the first time, history was seen as trying to “get somewhere,” and was looked upon as somehow interacting with Something on a “vertical” plane--a trans-subjective force which both intervened in history and drew human beings toward it.

Later, Christianity would develop an explicitly “logoistic” theory of history, seeing a literal descent of this vertical power into the stream of horizontal time, so as to forge a concrete link between the vertical and horizontal--betwen time and eternity. To say that "God became man" or "Word became flesh" is just another way of saying that the vertical, that is, the ultimate, timeless ground, outside time and anterior to manifestation, poured itself into material form and chronological time--not just in a single human being, but in humanity. Only humans can serve as a bridge between the higher and lower planes that are manifest in the outward flow of history. Indeed, this is our purpose: to nurture and grow the seed of eternity in the womb of time. (This is not dissimilar to the Jewish concept of Tikkun--of participating in the repair and completion of God's creation.)