“Time flies” is the quintessential truism, a metaphorical tautology of sorts, and if “time flies” so does history. If one takes, as an arbitrary limitation, all events occurred after the first year of the millennium, the year 2000, how much has happened since then? What has happened, even if just politically, even if just in the US? It is daunting to ponder all that has happened, one could write a book or just remain silent so as to not kill with excess of words. A man who was asked for a report of the last 24 years, and did not tremble at the prospect, he would be practically dead, because he would not have any sensibility for the realm of action, for the reality that is human culture and civilization, no love of questioning for what a good life amounts to. because he would show a lack of taste for human achievement he would show a lack of aptitude for historical enquiry and thinking, thus, he would be practically dead, dead to practice, and he would do better to search for more success in the study of nature, painting or plumbing. He is dead to history as he will be, shortly, to time; thus such unhistoric creature cannot be part of argumentation, that is, of any talk about what is practically just, Lenin’s question goes unbeknownst to him as it goes for must animals. What is history? “History is the realm of human action” at least, as much can be said a priori. Whatever man has actually done, that can be a posteriori discovered, is the content of history.
Saint Isidore, the internet patron and synthesizer of the western tradition (and, being on this medium, our patron by extent), defined history as narratio rei gestae, per quam eam, quae in praeterito facta sunt, dinoscuntur (an account of acts or deeds, by which those things that were done in the past are known). All translation is an inevitable betrayal, and a complete commentary upon this self evident definition is wasted on this writ, I will only make two essential remarks: On in praeterito facta sunt and rei gestae. Starting with the last, rei gestae, which I will from here upon just call “deed”, the evident must not be lost because it is so, not everything that is done is a deed; because all deeds are actions, but not all actions are deeds. Deeds are actions of a unique quality, they are not productions such as a work of art nor generations such as plats growing or mammals giving birth; neither mothers nor engineers are their cause, but deeds, they are neither natural nor artificial, they are ethical. Lastly, the first is in order: “What is known is what was done in the past”, Wikipedia says that history is “the systematic study and documentation of the past”. In conclusion, it would seem as if history is the realm of the past, the science of the past, and that history is a temporal science, being a secondary concern if the study of the past is meant to give understanding of the present or insight into the future. History would then be the realm of time, call it Kairos or Chronos if you are fonder of Greek speech, it could be put opposite to poetry, mathematics or metaphysics, as the realm of things that fly by, dust next to rhymes, numbers and the study of being itself. Time flies, and history with it, it seems so. Thus our mind moves swiftly from one concept to another, from time to history, they seem to be one natural analogy.
What is history? Is history time? Are time and history related? Time and history go quasinaturally hand in hand, they fit together in seamless array, they appear to be inextricably linked. And only the most scholastic habit of mind puts into question the natural flow of the two concepts, and the analogy woven of them. The scholastic imagination, used to definitions (that together make one big tapestry), would avoid the brutal integration of time into history that Wikipedia is committed to. Here we have respect for Wikipedia, we enjoy our summas both as scientific works and as products of art. Funnily enough, if one googles about Saint Isidore, a common trend of any article will be to say an historicism, to give you the gist, most will say, at bottom, that his work is important to understand history, but now that we have the internet it seems superfluous to use his work beyond philological curiosity.
Antiquarianism is to trade in dead things, at least larping fakes them to be alive, but antiquarianism does not even disguise its cadaveric business. A very different thing from antiquarian cope, is to realize that the always talked about “classics” are so called classics not because they are as important as their are dead, i.e., it is not their age itself that makes them valuable ( except for the most superficial of tastes that is). No, what makes a classic like Saint Isidore a classic, his essence qua classic bluntly put, is that Saint Isidore is alive more than any biological organism that is or can exist, in other words, he is a classic because he is alive, and next to him, the passing affairs of newspapers, antiquarians of the present, are dead. In the relevant sense is this meant, however and whichever allowance to biology might be needed. This insight was implied the statement of August Comte that “Humanity is always made up more of dead than living”. Now one need to say this with more economy, as a master of his own speech: History is made up, not of those that have history or read about it, but by those that make and write History. Historical science is a science of action, the wisdom it teaches is action, and so, to get scientific history, one needs to do things worth of history, in other words, history needs to be acted upon to be understood.
Now I can turn to ourselves and our epoch. I am a zoomer, a natural reactionary, my culture is the internet rightosphere, I have grown up with Richard Spencer, Carl Benjamin and Curtis Yarvin, among other more or less known enlighteners. I have grown up in the time of porn, feminism and the universalist faith of the Americanised globe, of the spoils of the puritan empire, and maybe of its remnant, I am European. Zoomers, as a generation, are a gate to the new century. And to be honest, all I want to do is, as the author and youtuber Nema Parvini (Academic Agent, AA), to end the boomer truth regime, mastering speech: I want the XXI century to take off, with roman numerals, and leave the XX century behind. Because the XX century was truly lovely, and because both piety and impatience make it imperative to leave the dead burry their dead; laissez faire, laissez passer in libertarian lingo. I do not think zoomers are better, in a linear sense, or worse in a circular one, a generation is not part of a wheel of time nor on a slope of continued progress; I think we are individual, unique, concrete, there is no repetition nor progress, there is just unique ages, with unique struggles, and the same perennial human nature behind. There is only one zoomer generation, there is only one Curtis Yarvin. Whatever right wing or new age symbolism of history we can brew up, Yarvin is Yarvin, Z is Z and history is history. Ranke said it with words that ring eternal: Every epoch is immediate to God. Wise words, because if there is a God, he is not contained by wheels, nor is he found closer to the start or to the end of a slide, but at every moment, uniquely. Synther Chronicles is the pathology of living in the immediate present, but not necessarily in, or with, the times*.
Every epoch is immediate to God and relativism leads to nihilism, historicism is a form of relativism. I love the Austrian school, and the most profound reason for such love is the perennial fight of the Austrian School against historicism. And historicism now has the worst effect, consequence of its maturity, fruit of its rotten substance: The effect of killing history.
What do I mean? That to be historical kills history? I will take a step back, because history and historicism are opposite each other, and so is ideology to understanding. An example will make for clarity.
When ancestors or epochs long gone are unfarly compared to the contemporary age some like to give such past times leeway, make allowance for the past by stating, in different tropes or manners of speech. people back then were more primitive. When man tries to protect the past from adolescent criticism with this strategy, we are being historicist, we are, of course, also being historicist when we believe that the past was always better, opposition does not imply superiority, only transcending does. To believe “the past” was a golden age or barbarism incarnate is besides the point, both claims fixate on something that is not the present, both claims believe the past to be beyond the historian’s reach and God´s providence, or good fortune. Historicism is the brand of reductionism that reduces reality to history. However, what is important to understand about historicism in this writ, is that historicism leads to the destruction of history as such, and it leads to such destruction because it conflates history with time, as it conflates becoming with being.
From Carl Menger to Hans Hermann Hoppe this fight has never stopped, truly, for the Austrian school; Sombart, the historicist rival of the first Austrian is dead, biologically and bibliographically, most do not know about him, but in a way we are all historicists now, even more than we might be Marxists or Keynesians. Few people might believe in a naïve mythology of progress anymore, less even with the war in Ukraine and the genocide in Gaza ongoing, but we are as a world, as men taking part in the same events and ideas being part of society, in the historical sense, all historicist. Progress is still news, maybe old, but news, and news are antiquities of the present; historicism however is a historical force that still needs to be killed, least it kill the science of history, and History with it. The dissident right has many enemies under the mantle of nihilism , my point is that historicism of all manifestations is one of them, the one whose function is to keep the XXI century from take off.
We can now return to our patron Saint Isidore, because, with some context and allowance, we now see that Wikipedia gives an essentially historicist definition of history, that needs not be revisited by Werner Sombart, and that only the scholastic mindset can truly understand what was meant with those words. History does not study the past, it tells what happened, it is a tale, to tell history is first an art. It is also a science, it is both tale and account. History is a “narrative”, which does not mean that history is false of course, or that it is relative, there is no art for art’s sake. The suicide rate of the Western World paired with its vague nihilism can both be traced back to Kant, to the force of his ideas. History, by itself, does not tell us about the truth of the Kantian doctrines, it gives at most glimpses of its truthfulness, what is proper for history to teach is but the strenght of the Kantian philosophy, and this strength is a truth, undeniably so. After all, history cannot tell us if ideas are true, only about their force and, because force is of the will, their human life; history is, so to speak, the bones and muscles of ideology, of ideas hegemonic in every epoch. What is most important is that history tells something, not everything. Not all but some “facts” are historical, the vast majority are just as dead as time, most of what man does is not an accomplishment, and is therefore, strictly speaking, unhistorical as Plato’s realm.
Because it is all so very simple: The past is the past, Napoleon had a privy and Oswald Spengler was bald**. All this are true, the first claim a priori, but not one of them is historical, it is not untold history, it is not even history to begin with, tasteless humour. At the end of the day, no historian, now or at any other time, ever needed all the facts, he only needs some of them, and whatever he found was of the totality of events, those which had life in them, and what was dead he left for dead. There is the art of the historian: Knowing what is more than time in a sea of timed acts. The historian needs to have a nose for greatness, and be a practical man that does not deal in trivialities. Here is were the forces of reaction, the vitalists, must answer Comte: History is and always has been the history of the living, only time, taken raw, is of the dead. If time exists as such, if time is the clock, it incessantly eats itself up; history however, is not the bite of a serpent on his tail, but more like one fat child that never stops eating, from birth to grave, everything that is thrown at it, keeping only memory of what was good, what tasted of greatness. This is the self-evident tautology of a definition that Saint Isidore gives, and it is the best starting point to make Wikipedia based, on historical rationality. Saint Isidore was putting into words the living classic tradition, that is, what was worth to let live and not to let die, because only truth is eternal. True power is power over life and death, what we want is true power, the power that truth gives, and we believe that Clio is our muse, because she can give us the good stuff, and nothing but the good stuff. Either way, we now know, at bare minimum, that Saint Isidore was not an historicist, we know that history and time cannot be conflated. We can move on.
What is history? What indeed if not time, as is common sensical to believe? This question is a whole life of answering, at least it is worth a book of an answer. Luckily for us, a blog can give us the most essential gist of such an answer. Because, if the common conception of history for Tacitus, Saint Agustin and Leopold von Ranke can be summed up in a sentential principle, in isidorian fashion, it would be this: History is not time, but what transcends time. History would yet to be defined, but, at bare minimum, with this claim, it is put beyond the realm of time, it gives man a criteria by which to separate news and history, because books and newspapers have been shown to not be good enough.
What is history? History is a selection of events, of some and not the totality of events. Res gestae is the latin best translated for “acts”, like in the New Testament book Acts of the Apostles, and not by “facts” as so often is said among contemporary historians. To keep up with the schoolboy exercises in latin: Verba non facta. History is about words, that is, thoughts manifested in action, and not facts, because facts neither speak nor can they be spoken to, facts are silent, words ultimately are of the living and for the living, and always so. Stones do not act, stones do not think, stones do not speak, therefore, there is no history of rocks. Finally, to ask if history is linear or circular is a concern of the philosopher, if a concern at all. The myth says what it says affirmed Malinovsky; History says what it says say I. History is the essence of innumerable biographies is the carlylean truism. Biographies are made, not by the life as such, which is given by a forensic or a biological account, but by the deeds, the action, in words and in work, of the most relevant men, great men. Be the great men groups, individuals, classes or nations, we say great men in a formal sense, being talk of heroes both for the sociologist and the classic historian; what is essential is that there are always great men, as there is always only a selection of events and not a totality. There are heroes because history is not newspapers of other centuries. There can be news without a hero, no history without a person made subject of protagonist. Carlyle, being such a reactionary man of letters, himself was an historian, the historian relevant to our subject matter, to understand history to be the realm of heroism, not divinity or facts, to our epoch, that is, to those like Curtis Yarvin… to old Mencius Moldbug.
But why all this fuss about whatever history or time are? Because now we see that time and history are, in a fundamental sense, distinct, relatively opposed, and that we get to know the difference between clockmakers and historians: Clockmakers measure time, historians discover what transcends it. They are different crafts, impossible without time, who treat it according to other rules and finalities, they are different arts. There is no historical act without an historian, no hero without his chronicle, without a narrative there is no true hero, history is for those who do history, but also for those who write it, and which of them is mine redundant to state. I am taking just another step in the path that Curtis Yarvin, he who arranged Thomas Carlyle, he who restated the essence of history, has opened for us, I am giving words to deeds: Yarvin is important, that is, he is not old news, he is not even part of the news, he is historical and the proof is that I am writing this.
Much has been said about Yarvin, much has been said about Trump, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pornography, Twitter, 4chan, the Internet, Nick Fuentes, Fiddler's Green or Taylor Swift; but all in the moment, in the middle of action and not while contemplating it. Curtis Yarvin has opened a path, but he is, more importantly, a sign of our era, an example by which to illustrate anyone what history is about. What amounts to nothing has been said being woke and spirited with history, impregnated with it, at least, not enough has been said for my taste and, I hope, for the taste of the most of us. The taste of greatness is needed, now that small narratives have died, at the hands of postmodern genius. Much more could be said about the phrase history is what transcends time, to do this is the task I have at hand to fulfil, and with it comes orderly ending. My task is this: To make the synthetic clearing of this proposition history is what transcends time, i.e., to articulate this proposition both in relation to metaphysics and to our immediate epoch, and thus give form not to another “post” philosophy, but to the same old one, unconstrued, while it chases this the epoch of zoomers, at the point where the hourglass finishes, and time falls down the line. Synthetic philosophy is metaphysical history, it is, after centuries, the mature fruit of sociology. Welcome to SyntherChronicles's Chronicle.
Annotations:
*This is another wording for the truism “be in but not of the world”, but the High Priestly Prayer, read in Latin, is to be had in mind when reading it, sorry for the spergy theology, the tradcath took over for a second).
**This, that Oswald Spengler was bald, is a fact, but it is not really history, maybe “deep lore”, information at best, but not history; historians might research about Napoleon and his bathroom, but only to find something worthy in the rubble, something that is not about the bathroom something relevant, that Spengler was bald is not significant, still funny. And even if baldness and nether eschatology were shown to be important, it would be, in one way or another, by relating them to the bundle of events that make Napoleon Napoleon, it would still prove that this essay was right about what History is, and not about the importance of baldness or bathrooms.