A while back I asked myself, "What's the matter with these people?" I was asking about the "patriarchy bad" crowd, but you could point the question toward just about any collection of idealists. I started looking up phrases. I think the first one might have been "Critical Legal Theory," but it could have been any of a vast array of related topics. What I found is that you can't grab hold of any of these phrase cast about today without digging back further and further. Something I finally figured out is that part of the reason so little makes sense in the culture war, why most of us not baptized into the "Critical Social Justice" cult all feel gaslighted, has something to do with where we pin the time line to mark the "beginning of history."

On some level, most people in the "west" mark it way the hell back into at least ancient to even pre-historic periods. I say "most people," but should also point out that the number is constantly thinning. In some ways it would depend on how one is raised, or how one is educated in his formative youth. If you think about it, though, more and more people you deal with pin it at the civil rights era, WW II, the depression and the new deal, the great war, the suffrage movement, the gilded age...1776...1619...colonization...the enlightenment...the renaissance...the fall of Rome...whatever. The point is, where you stick your pin marks the period in history at which BLAME can be assigned. Many people today care for history only back to what they consider to be the turning point for the identity that they've formed for themselves as their personal experiential truth narrative.

One could almost look at current social, political and even cultural divisions as fractured along the lines of both distinct, and varyingly overlapping origin stories. At what point in history can I identify the persecution, enslavement, or liberation of the historical peoples with whom I most closely identify? To many people today, that marks the "beginning of history." That's where the story begins. As I was trying to dig into "what's the matter with these people," what I found was that the further I dug, the "MATTER" varied according to time, place, perspective...the irritating phrase today is positionality.

Probably the most horrifying discovery that I've made thus far is that huge masses of individuals no longer feel like they have a people. The incredible rapidity with which cultures have collided and interspersed over the recent centuries has disintegrated so many people(s) from any once epic mythologies they might have enjoyed, history, for them has become a reconstruction project. Where did my people lose their identity, and how can I build one anew?

The culture war today is less about control of the multicult than it is about a reestablishment of multiplicity. In the end there will never be only one. I wonder if the efficiencies of economic globalization might be part of the problem, and the stupidity of our attempt to create permanent national borders might be another part. The fear of what a modern war for control of territory is a valid concern, but the vast majority of human existence involved the flow of populations, the flow of cultural institutions, the flow of technologies, and the flow of the influence and prosperity of civilizations.

I wonder if the lines on the map were allowed to flow as they used to, if the flow of people toward greener pastures might reinvigorate the flow of prosperity toward the territories of peoples who have learned to cooperate toward better levels of self-governance....