“Effective history”
deprives the self of the reassuring stability
of life and nature,

and it will not permit itself
to be transported by a voiceless obstinacy
toward a millennial ending…

This is because knowledge is not made for understanding;
it is made for cutting.

“Effective history”
deals with events
in terms of their most unique characteristics,
their most acute manifestations.

An event, consequently,
is not
a decision, a treaty, a reign or a battle,
but the reversal of a relationship of forces,
the usurpation of power,
the appropriation of a vocabulary
turned against those who had once used it,
a feeble domination that poisons itself as it grows lax,
the entry of the masked “other.”

Nietzsche, Genealogy, History by Michel Foucault, trans. by D. Bouchard and S. Simon

Yesterday I met with the cardiologist for an annual check up. The Doctor’s reply to my inquiry about the potential effect of continuing on a blood-thinner for the long term was succinct.  You could bleed.  I imagined a few scenarios where free bleeding without swift treatment would result in my exit.

The quoted lines were penned by Michel Foucault to reflect upon Nietzsche’s philosophy of history. Foucault indicates that history does not console. To the contrary, knowledge of our past in effect causes us to bleed. Existentially, psychologically, – nausea seems the apt response.  What is the likelihood from all reports that after all is said and done, (no matter how much time is required) humanity will be holding hands, singing together, Kumbaya? The Hebrew term is from a hymn of praise, that you will hear in evangelical Christian circles. Odds in favor of a divinely ordained millenial wrap-up are not apparent.

I do not think there is anything more important to us than our human story. My story and your story has a place in the larger composite of our birth family, in the story of the place where our grandparents left behind, etc.. We Americans are all emigres are we not? The macro account of humanity, our story is one of passage, migrations from Africa, the passage using the Berring Land Bridge. Ethnologists are busy to construct stories of the origins of the decoupage of any given people’s culture. Every culture is a paste-up of migratory peoples. We Americans, region by region, are stories that combine components from England, Spain, French-Creole, China, Indigenous peoples.  The history of Homo Sapiens, and America in particular is of hunger, conflict, war, success-good-enough-to-get-by, and failure.

Effective history does not offer the consolation that we’d all choose. Events are rife with risk, hazard, and I question whether, the arc of the universe necessarily bends toward justice. Even if M. L. King Jr. thought so. Only in retrospect can anything whatsoever be said about that.  Right now, from my vantage point at Starbucks, it does not seem so.

Finally, a few more lines of comment from Foucault about “effective history.”

The inverse of the Christian world, spun entirely by a divine spider,
and different from the world of the Greeks,
divided between the realm of will
and the great cosmic folly,

the world of effective history knows only one kingdom,
without providence or final cause,
where there is only
“the iron hand of necessity shaking the dice-box of chance.” *

* The Dawn by Friedrich Nietzsche, aphorism 120