Organizing Schemes

Some kind of organizing scheme is needed here. And if it’s to be useful then it needs to issue from a perspective that’s wide enough to encompass a good many particulars, but not so wide as to lose contact with them.

Jaspers was one of many writers who over the last century or so have spoken of the historical present as an age of transition. Although, if we’re being strict then the question of, into what, remains unanswerable.

The impossibility of prognostication with any claim to knowledge hasn’t stopped many from making the attempt. The temptation to complete sentences that begin with some variant of, we are evolving into, or we are moving into an age when should, I think, be resisted, impressive as those constructions are. This kind of talk is often political or aspirational, an expression of either hope or foreboding. And while it can have a purpose, it falls inevitably short of knowledge, and usually well short.

We should, I think, frankly acknowledge that we don’t know where this Gogolian troika is heading, only where it has been, and something about its speed and trajectory. And while trajectories tend to persist, the only necessity in history is that which is a function of our biology.

Gogol answered his own question “Where do you fly to?” this way: “She doesn’t answer.” She, of course, was Russia. And she doesn’t answer because she couldn’t.