The Geology of History

Before the dam burst open and Europe was cleft along its equator, the divisions of the protestant reformation slowly formed over the course of centuries as one ruling power enriched itself against the monopoly of Rome. After the decline of the original pan-occidental empire, the Roman Church took the throne and declared itself the superriding authority over all things. The Empire continued by becoming the state, allowing the various kingdoms to exist under it so long as they declared allegiance to its centralized power, allowing free travel, monastic ownership, and ultimate ideological conformity to the papal will. Below this, independent power developed by the gradual enrichment of the secular kingdoms, who eventually began to declare their sovereignty. These new secular authorities declared their side when the secret war split open and allegiances were openly declared, thus splitting Europe between protestant and catholic.

The same process occurred in Rome itself. The senate, the scattered gentry was upstaged violently by the growing power of the military when Caesar crossed the rubicon and declared the Empire, thus instituting the new ruling faction. A tension deeply embedded became explicit at this point, one faction declaring itself real and striking against the ruling faction from which they emerged. In Germany, the cartel-industrialists struck against the Weimar State, Hitler coming into power to replace the republic with the reich. IG Farben themselves ultimately fell to the dogs, exiled and replaced as all their peers were. The mechanics of their faction remained in place however, the cartel becoming standard business wisdom, technocratic rule becoming, by the 1990s, the ruling orthodoxy across the NATO-sphere. Denazification worked in the way it did for this reason, only the figureheads decapitated, while the apparatus itself, that which “made the trains run on time” was kept intact, able to continue on what was began in the late 19th century by those who dared to imagine a ruling ideology more fluid than aristocracy.

Nazism is a vital point of investigation for being a completely schizophrenic ideology. As some have pointed out, Hitler was, more than he was an important figure in himself, acted as a conduit for powers to flow through. The nazi party was internally at war with itself, Prussian militarism of the Totenkopf, Himmlerite traditionalism, the last gasps of the dying aristocracy, the technocrats previously mentioned… The fates of Nazi party officials were fates determined by their allegiance to these factions. Himmlerites were purged into obscurity, Prussians were reintegrated into the police-militarism of “counter-terrorism”, aristocrats were sent back to slowly decay in their crumbling palaces, and the technocrats preserved if not in direct forms, the most visible figures cast out, the companies cut up and repackaged, the last Krupp dying without an heir, the dynasty’s economic apparatus being subsumed into Thyssen.

As shown by those who reacted so violently against it, the direct ideological content of many modernisms was, as the individual beliefs of these actors previously mentioned, almost totally irrelevant. Modernism came on sprouting thousands of microscopic religiosities as a result of its overriding structure, the thing to be productively questioned. Each new pamphlet, each new manifesto had identical structure that came into full form in the totalitarian modes identified by Arendt. In these, the deeper structure behind all these isms was made explicit, brought into full form through the excuse of whatever brought it to life. Larger than any individual movement, larger than even those who found themselves made into kings as a result of riding it, all these beneath were caught up in the subtle flow beneath them.

Confucius wrote his theory of socio-political practice around a conception of the nation where it exists as a way, a dao around which to harmonize. In this, he recognized more than any western writer of ideal politics ever has. The nation is neither a spiritual identity-forming object nor a meaningless abstraction blocking the path to eschatological paradise, but a flow, a subtle current of spiritual energy. While nations themselves are a tricky way to analyze this, this overall picture shows the way of all history. Since the beginning of human-scale time, systems have been undergoing process of emergence, stratification, and reabsorption. Flows express themselves form within strata and recreate themselves as the new stratum, until the next movement, the next dissolving or reintegration or tectonic shift. As below our feet, the Earth moves on timescales impossibly vast compared to the timescale of species, below our political imaginations, history moves on timescales impossibly vast compared to our ideological imaginations.