The Terror of History: On the Uncertainties of Life in Western Civilization, Teofilo F. Ruiz. Princeton University Press, NJ. 2011.
An introduction to this work would be Eliade’s “The Myth of Eternal Return,” where the difference between sacred, ritual, cyclical, primordial, “ahistorical” time, is contrasted with a secular, commonplace, linear, modern, historical time. Here, Ruiz offers three human responses to the banalities and so-called ‘profaneness’ of modern, historical time of civilization: religious activities, indulging in the senses and physical world, and art and creativity.
The terror of history is the result of the tension between our ‘dreams of reason,’ our desire for orderliness and reasonableness, and the chaos and unreason which seems to constantly fly in the face of it. In order to deal with repeating catastrophes, whether they be natural or ‘man made,’ (wars and genocides, etc), we escape in various ways. An important way is by inventing scapegoats, like witches, or any kind of “other,” who can be blamed for the perceived evils.
Ch 1. The Terror of History
(8) Athens kept a human scapegoat, ready to be sacrificed if things went too wrong in the city.
(9) In a debate among Republican candidates for the presidential election in 2008, almost one third of the ten candidates running declared in public that they did not accept Darwin’s theory of evolution.
(9) The terror of history is all around us, gnawing endlessly at our sense of, and desire for order. It undermines, most of all, our hopes.
(11) Our continuous celebration of Western technological advances and political order has been achieved through the continuous projection of power beyond our borders, by endless wars, and by systemic injustice and inequity.
(16) Suspecting or knowing that there is probably no meaning or order in the universe, we combat this dark perspective by continuously making meaning, by imposing order on our chaotic and savage past, by constructing explanatory schemes that seek to justify and elucidate what is essentially inexplicable. These half-hearted attempts to explain the inexplicable and to make sense of human cruelty are what we call ‘history.’ It is the writing of history itself.
(17) People will often find great solace in belief. Though god’s actions often seem inexplicable and cruel, there is always the reassuring belief that the deity knows why such things need to happen…In the end, all events, awful and good, form part of an overarching sacred project to which we all play a part.
(21) All of these approaches [religion, indulging in the senses, and exploring art] aim at coming to terms with our awareness of our mortality.
- All of our acts are attempts at immortality. Attempts to transcend the suffocating straight jackets of time and space. To be fully immersed in the limitlessness that we secretly know the universe is, from the unseeable microscopic universe through the endless unreachable night skies
Whether time is linear or cyclical, whether space is endless concentric circles or frozen in a Parmendian squeeze ... in all cases, it is never ending and never beginning. And yet, our awareness is that our own personal bodies, minds, egos, DID begin and WILL end. So what gives? Why have we been short-changed? Religion, art, and physical-peak-experience triumphs, are our conduits into that limitlessness. Those activities tell us we are connected to it, that we haven’t been completely short-changed.
(22) We live always at the edge of the abyss.
- … which is both terrifying and exhilarating, which we are both somewhat aware of and somewhat ignorant of.
We live in a constant stream of paradoxes, the most significant perhaps being that we have created a world that we claim has created us...and vice versa! Everything is a chicken or the egg dilemma. And in the chains of our Manichaean Paranoia, we must choose one or the other. In the chains of our physical being, that is, in order to ACT at all, we must at each moment choose one or the other. Sure, in our moments of reflection, we may sit on the fence in quiet contemplation, but in “real life,” you can’t be neutral on a moving train.
(23) As I retell stories about mystics, messianic figures, those who seek the pleasure of the body, those who embrace beauty, one common thread runs through their collective wishes: to obliterate time, to stop change, to end time or to achieve, through prayer, purgation, ecstatic physical joy, or aesthetic redemption that timelessness that would take us beyond history and decay.
(29) Fed by misogyny and kindled by a context of dramatic social, economic, cultural, and political changes, the identification, hunting, burning, and hanging of witches diverted attention of most of the population from the harsh realities of the world and squarely placed blame on witches for the misfortunes of the age. The witch then joined a long list of scapegoats – the Jew, the leper, the Muslim, the heretic, the homosexual, and others on the margins of society.
(31) The United States was crawling with utopian communities in the nineteenth century, and some of these have survived into the present. Such exercises against history are quite common in the Western experience.
- Modern examples are Jonestown, Waco, Heaven’s Gate. The smaller, extreme examples are called ‘cults.’ The larger, more mundane examples are called ‘religion.’
(31) Writing, art, and music are creative forms of sublimating uncertainties about one’s life and historical role.
- Mass shootings, violent crime, drug and alcohol abuse would be an examples of unacceptable forms of sublimating.
Ch 2. Religion and the World to Come
(36) As we have seen, the first and most enduring reaction to the plague’s carnage and to other similar catastrophes has been to see illness and natural or human-inflicted disasters as god’s punishment on a wicked humanity. This act of affirmation – catastrophes are god’s justified response to humankind’s weakness, lack of faith, stubbornness, and many other reprehensible traits – has a very long pedigree in Western tradition.
(37) Prayer, certainly among Catholics, is a continuous negotiation with the godhead to prevent the annihilation of the world.
(41) From the first written historical records of mankind to the religious symbols displayed in modern democracies today – think for example of the oath taken on the Bible by politicians and those sworn to serve on juries, the religious invocations in Congress, references to God in school pledges, and the like – religion and politics have long blended almost seamlessly into coherent structures of power.
- Political power is more effective with religious power, and are often indistinguishable, even in countries who have an ostensible ‘separation of church and state.’
(47) It is not by calculating the increase in material wealth or technology that we should measure progress, but by what our values are.
(57) Neoplatonism [in the Roman Empire], above all in Plotinus’ work, turned philosophy into religion.
(57) As the [Roman] empire declined in the shadows of military dictatorship, and its inhabitants experienced growing social and economic malaise, the majority of the people escaped the pervasive gloom of their world by embracing redemptive religions that promised a better life and salvation in the world beyond…the cults of Isis, Demeter, Mithras, and of the Christ tells you that redemption awaits you after death.
- ‘social malaise’ begets need for redemptive religion
- what does it say about a culture that needs a religion that says ‘this life isn’t very good, but its ok, because the afterlife is paradise.’
(59) Although other social and economic factors played a part, the emphasis of the new religions, and Christianity most of all, on the afterlife instead of the here and now and on the superiority of belief over reason, as well as their strong condemnation of classical plays, classical art, and entertainment, and the idea that power came from god or the gods and not from human institutions sounded the death knell for the world of classical antiquity.
- Redemptive religions as a response to oppressive political institutions
- ‘belief over reason’ = religion as an escape from the tension of everyday reality, from having to carefully consider seemingly irreconcilable experiences
(59) [these kinds of beliefs like redemptive religions] represent of rejection of history and attempt to step out of historical processes, to escape the crushing reality of everyday expectations, or the dark components of historical development.
- It’s basically like a little kid closing their eyes and covering up their ears, and yelling “la la la la la la…this isn’t happening…la la la..”
(60) To the true believer explanations are unnecessary.
- ‘explanations’ = critical thought, reasonable thought
(61) The most common and individual form of resistance to, or rejection of the suffocating grip of history is through some form of religious experience, either mystic rapture or communal feeling translated into millennial dreams or utopian fantasies.
- Rejection of this world in favor of a made up, platonic, ideal world of fantasy.
- Sports and other activates as secular forms to exercise one’s need for fanaticism. This need for fanaticism happens when we leave the cyclical rhythms of Nature, and enter the faux/invented linear time of history and the promise of afterlife paradise and faith fantasies of the redemptive religions.
(61) When English puritanical radicals in the seventeenth century or John Ashcroft, the former head of the Justice Department under George W Bush proclaimed that they had no king but Jesus, they voiced sentiments that went directly to the heart of the matter at issue here. That is, that when confronted with unjust and oppressive rulers, as was the case in seventeenth century England, devotees of religious movements reject the situation in the name of god, join the ranks of the godly, and take up arms against the ungodly.
(62) I am far less interested in the violence that emerges from the confrontation between opposing views about orthodoxy, as for example the religious wars that plagued Europe in the wake of the Reformation, than I am in the violence generated by dire social conditions, leading often to apocalyptic outbursts. These are precisely the communal movements that wish to erase history, to usher in Christ’s second coming, or the Messiah in the case of Judaism, thus, the end of time.
- conservative republicanism (which implies Christian) is an ‘apocalyptic outburst.’ A rejection and wanton destruction of the physical world / Nature, in order to faster bring on the rapture and end times into paradise. (see American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America, With God on Their Side: George W Bush and the Christian Right).
(65) The emergence of Satan as the focus for witch beliefs and the widely held idea that witchcraft was an alternative religion led to public and popular-supported witch burnings and hangings. If one could just get rid of these horrid witches, then everything would be all right. It sounds, and it was, a bit irrational, but how much more irrational was the fear of witches than our modern fears of terrorism, weapons of mass destruction (even if non-existent), and other such modern ways of channeling modern anxieties? For most people it is much better to worry about such matters than about real and depressing facts, such as the erosion of civil liberties, the deteriorating environment, economic malaise, and the growing distance between social classes. Blame it on the witches or, as some modern politicians and fundamentalists have done, blame it on Bin Laden and/or homosexuals.
- Again, Fanaticism feels better than (like a drug) the tension of critical thought.
- Blaming 9/11 and Mass Shootings, etc on “evil people,” placates the complexities of the real issues.
- Thus Satan, and whoever has fallen under his “evil” spell becomes the easy scapegoat…for literally anything.
(66) Paradoxically, the witch craze occurred in the midst of one of the most exciting intellectual periods in Western history [ca 1500 – 1660]. And this is a grim reminder that we always walk a perilous path and that the tilting point between reason and irrationality is a narrow one.
(68) Christianity’s rigid dichotomy between good and evil..
- Is a blatant refusal to accept the responsibilities and accountabilities associated with having self- aware, critical thought.
(71) The witch craze is an example of how early modern people embraced a set of beliefs that are, to most of us in the twenty-first century, close to delusional.
- What will the future say about our delusional ways?
Ch 3. The World of Matter and the Senses
(91) It was not until the rise of asceticism, already implicit in Plato but forcefully articulated from the second century of the Christian era onwards, that the view that the body and the material world are corruptible and evil took a foothold in the West.
- How did this develop?
(99) We live in permanent tension between rational individualism and our yearning for community and the transcendental obliteration of the Self. In short, wild celebrations formed not by small groups of intellectuals but by common people seem to have far more vitality and popularity than the seeking of the reflective life.
(122) If Civilization, as Freud argued, is our revenge on the Id, we sublimate our desires, ahistorical as they may be, by paying the terrible price of neurosis and discontent. It seems then that either we give ourselves entirely to our passions and live a life close to that of the idealized prelapsarian humans, or we live in history and thus in pain.
Ch 4. The Lure of Beauty and Knowledge
(132) Freud defined ‘civilization’ as a continuous sublimation of one’s instinctual and destructive inner core.
- Why did he think our inner core was essentially destructive?
(143) All utopias, or at least, most utopias, are essentially ways to escape history.
- Isn’t self-reflective thought in itself a form of utopia?
(150) The terror of history consists of far more than just inexplicable catastrophes or the nadir of man’s violence against man and his destructiveness of the planet. The terror of history may also consist of the dreadful absurdities of everyday life, of the oppression of quotidian banalities, or the inexorable passing of time. The mindless repetition of essentially boring activities…In many respects these well established routines, the patterns of everyday life, provide large doses of comfort and security as well. They give us a false sense of an ordered universe.
- the tension between the safety/security vs the boredom of modern comforts
- life in Nature cannot be this banal because one is constantly either hunting or being hunted by other consciousnesses.
(154) Art conquers fleeting time.
(157) When we turn the beautiful in a scholarly inquiry, something fundamental vanishes.
- The following quotes come from a series of lectures called The Terror of History: Mystics, Heretics, and Witches in the Western Tradition. They were once available on Audible, but that doesn’t appear to be the case anymore.
“The evolution of dogma in the Christian church is the result of the antagonisms between different points of view…heresies are instrumental in the creation of orthodoxy…and in the end it really comes down to a question of power. Heresies are defined by the victors…you can’t brand someone a heretic unless you have the power to enforce the penalties of being a heretic,” Teofilo F. Ruiz, The Terror of History Lectures, Lecture 9: Heresy and the Millennium.
“Renaissance men did not believe that the truth lay in the future; they believed the greatest knowledge lay in the past…they were attempting to reach into the deep past for the truth that was undiluted by centuries and millennia of corruption and deterioration,” Teofilo F. Ruiz, The Terror of History Lectures, Lecture14: the Mysteries of the Renaissance.
“History is created by the elites…It is bent to their service…It is a way in which we try to explain the unexplainable. It is the way in which we give order and reason to things that are neither orderly or reasonable…It is our own actions that terrorize us, and therefore, in order to deal with this, in order to make meaning of it, we construct and create religion, scapegoats, sacred places, as a way of escaping all of it,” Teofilo F. Ruiz, The Terror of History Lectures, Lecture 24: the Survival of the Past.