PART EIGHT: World Order
CHAPTER XXXIII

REWRITING HISTORY FOR UTOPIA

The Taming of History

The troubles of the world impregnate and corrupt its history. Great evil lies in history, as it has happened, but also and especially as it has been reported. If the first social law of prekalotic Earth is the skewed distribution of its goods, and the second is the psychological nature of its problems, the third law is the bias of its history.

History is the subject of historiography, and historiography is a politicized discipline. What, indeed, are the facts of history? History is what happened. It is also evidence for laws of behavior. But history is what should have happened too. It is an image of oneself, of the historian and of his audiences. It is, finally, the mirror of the future.

Each people has its own history. Whatever actually happened, each people must have its own history. For history is what its individuals believe has happened to them. Woe to a people that wishes to ascend in self-respect and world influence without a special history for its passport. The English have not done for Ghana what they have done for themselves; nor the Americans for the Mexicans; not the Arabs for the Copts, nor the Russians for the Japanese or Japanese for the Chinese. It is apparent that each people needs its own history and must have it in order to be stable itself and effective with others. With rare exception, the histories of peoples well supplied with historians have been racially and culturally prejudicial; have imputed false motives to the "others" encountered in their long group lives; misstated facts; glossed over problems; in jected propaganda copiously; and perpetrated and perpetuated legends and myths. That is, historiography in the large is culture-bound.

Weak, and perhaps unappreciated, efforts have been directed against these faults. Some experts have sought to broaden history-writing by producing special histories of distinct subgroups-companies, regions, cities, religious sects, occupations, classes, or families. Certainly when attention is given to a portion of the whole, preoccupation with the worship of bloody leviathan is somewhat corrected; the process of adding detail and depth must add truth and tolerance.

Then, men have sought objectivity, lifting themselves by disciplined will and scientific method from the miasma of parochialism. Since more objectivity is to be preferred to less objectivity, there can be no question of their virtue.

After each revolution, and indeed after every generation, comes a rewriting of history, usually in the name of objectivity. But, whose objectivity is it to be? Thus, three years after the Rumanian communists triumphed, an official guide to history book censorship and historical objectivity was promulgated. History was to be a story of the development of production, of progress and evolution, of the evolving class principle. The new historians of Rumania tumbled old kings and carved new communist statues. To use one writer's account of what was done, they reinterpreted history by omission, by substitution, by new emphases, and by corruption.1

Knowing that has happened many times elsewhere, that historiography is the companion-in-arms of political propaganda, we must not shrink from matching the new revolution with a new history. The justification for rewriting history is, as we have already said, preponderant, and in any case is inevitable. Again a new subjectivity replaces the old subjectivity and, by definition, this new version has an advantage; it is a priori likely to be more objective.

In the last century, owing to the determined efforts of a few men,2 history has been made more relevant. It has become social history, the total life involvement of men and women, rather than the caperings of politicians and warriors.

These laudable tendencies are abetted by the opening up of new opportunities for men to be historians. Recruitment from outside the ruling class and the class of official writers (mandarins or brahmins, for example) brings new perspectives to historiography. Historians are closer today to the arenas of power; they begin to serve all circles of influence, and in turn become more influential and independent themselves; they can lead the way to newer social myths.

With all of this, history, even in countries of relatively free expression, is still written mostly for a clique, usually the establishment of plutocratic, governmental, and academic cooperators. Historians are servitors of the political elite and read each other's work. And therefore history cannot be taken seriously as a continuous progressive revealing of truths. Who among such historians cares about other nations' feelings? Who cares indeed about the consequences upon one's own people of history-writing about other people? Historiography is often sharply a matter of power.

In the year 213 B.C. and the imperial reign of Shih-huang, under the advice of Li Ssu, it was decreed

that all books in the bureau of history, save the records of Ch'in, be burned; that all persons in the empire, save those who hold a function under the control of the bureau of the scholars of wide learning, daring to store the Shih (Book of Poems), the Shu (Book of History), and the discussions of the various philosophers, should go to the administrative and military governors so that these books may be discriminately burned... Those who use the past to criticize the present, should be put to death together with their relatives... Books not to be destroyed will be those on medicine and pharmacy, divination by the tortoise and milfoil, and agriculture and aboriculture. As for persons who wish to study the laws and ordinances, let them take the officials as their teachers.3

Over two millenia later, Western and Soviet scholars join in lamenting the directions of Chinese historiography under the new Cultural Revolution and pray for a new "Han Dynasty" to replace Mao Tse Tung just as happened to the Chi-in Dynasty within a decade.

The Marxist-Leninist principle of historical analysis was replaced by a racial principle. The dethroned "Europocentrism" has been replaced, for the first fifteen centuries (of this era) at least, by an entirely undisguised "Asiacentrism"... In the opinion of Li Shu, "The radical direction of the development of historical science in China consists of explaining the general laws of development of human society on the basis of the history of China"....

Warm our Russian "Marxist-Leninist" scholars, "The whole history of mankind will be concentrated automatically in one corner of Asia."4

It depends, as the folk-saying goes, on whose ox is being gored, "Soviet historiography has not significance in itself, nor has any other branch of learning in the Soviet state. It is the handmaiden of political authority."5 And American historians, most prominently in textbooks and press media, of course, have often acted the puppet of national pride without any state machinery to dictate to them, as in the history of the Mexican War, the Spanish-American War and World War I. Recounting especially the travesty that whites had made of black history, John Hope Franklin has said:

If we are to have a history worthy of the principles of truth, we must revise our way of looking at our own history, that is, the history of the United States. We must be willing to teach a history that is itself revisionist. The search for truth is never ending but the way to begin is to be willing to seek it.

In Nasser's Egypt, writes Anouar Abdel-Malek

The military regime... were led to shatter the continuity of Egyptian history in favor of nothing but the only links of which they wished to be the preservers. Pharaonic Egypt Coptic Egypt,modernist and liberal Egypt from Bonaparte to Mustafe el- Nahas were deliberately minimized. All that stood out was Islamic Egypt, from the Arab conquest to the end of the eighteenth century, the incidental islet of Arabi's revolt, and military Egypt since July 23 (1952).7

Practical and philosophical revolutionaries have usually insisted that the tides of history move with them. They imply that man is a pawn of historical forces, and cannot govern his history. So elemental Christianity, Islam, Comte, Marx Tolstoi, and Mao, in fact many progenitors of great religious political, and ideological revolutions. Receiving courage from their profession of "inevitability," they instill courage in their disciplies and followers by the millions.

But if some event is inevitable, siding with it is not an act of revolution, so much as it is a counterrevolutionary act. The crab that comes in with the tide is not pushing the water onto the shore,granted even that a trillion crabs will enhance by their essential cooperativeness the movements of the tides. There was Hegel,teacher of Marx who declared history to be the story of mind and will; reality is in the mind;what the mind is capable of imagining can become the facts of history. And truly the Fascist revolutions,which were like crabs coming in with the tide,along with their food supply of economic and political troubles,chose to be Hegelian and to see great historical changes as a challenge and triumph of will.

Objective history, unbiased history, a history fair to all, is impossible, if only because historians are a highly unadaptable and inelastic supply of manpower. If man could divide up a world history and assign its contents without exciting strife, the problem of a world order complete in all respects would be solved.

The United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization sponsored what was supposed to be a non-biased portrayal of history. In conception it was an "equal-time" history. All peoples would be treated as they deserved, which, given relativity of dessert-appreciation, meant simply what the historians believed they deserved, and in blocking this professional bias, it came to mean equality. This idea too was abandoned. For how allocate the time of history among national historians - by the countries' populations, wealth, number of books sold, by the number of historians qualified to write? Nor does historiographic reform consist of seeking so many schools of history that anyone who wants a history can have one to his own liking. For who shall get readers (and viewers of films) will be the de facto historian and that is a question of social power.

Modern man is a plaything of the mass media. Marshall McLuhan, but before him many others,8 put the essential current idea. "The medium is the message." Past generations realized this, as the bishops spoke ex cathedra and the king from his throne.

History, even kalotic historiography, is only real history when it lives in the minds and hearts of people. The message means little unless it is delivered. The logic is inescapable: not only must history be written kalotically, but the messages of history must be imprinted kalotically. The Kalotic Revolution cannot leave its messages with Hollywood, Madison Avenue, the Kremlin, and the Inner City of Peking to be delivered; else their messages will be history in the same futile sense in which Gibbons' Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire became Hollywood's grotesquerie of the same title, and the mass murderer, Genghis Khan, became a dashing hero in its celluloid history, which is the real history of the millions. The historians have to be responsible for history unto its end in, and predispositions to, kalotic action.

A consensus may be found to discuss those things which are not to be said about others. These negative directions tell us: Do not make indivious comparisons between the self and others. Do not be hostile. Do not overestimate or underestimate the interdependency of peoples. Do not impute evil motives to others. Do not stress military campaigns and dynastic events to the detriment of all other happenings. Observing these principles we can begin a world order. Everyone everywhere will believe in themselves by believing in the history that has been especially created for their unity. It will be for us as Marx said of his historical task: "once the thither side of truth had vanished, to establish the truth of the hither side."9

Whence we say, in Kalotics, that society changes, and from time to time, following an up-and-down flow, man moves towards prosperity, towards stability and freedom, towards a world order in line with domestic tranquillity. The turns of history are uncertain: the ways of man's nature are several; when his nature is not averse to the political order that one wishes him to have, there is no reason to let history be ungoverned or relegated to others. If knowledge of the past is scientifically obtained and applied in directions that illuminate and support the Kalotic Consensus, then history will promote peace, order and rapid progress.

The history that needs to be written is the history of what affects the desired and visualized future. Therefore, it must be partial and controlled so as to achieve its mission - voluntarily by those who perform the operation, we would hope, but determinedly in some fashion at all events. Let it be the aim of the revolutionary force to have the best poets and scholars find joy in reporting it. (If they will not, they must be allowed to plan and to write as they please.)

The Tutors of kalocracy should write a history of man that will coordinate all national histories on a harmonious note and that will point evidently to the shape and substance of the new world order.

Historians should be engaged in consulting the past in terms of the problems and interests of an impending future, instead of reporting a past in order to discover some mathematical curve which future events are bound to describe.10

To command history, we must make demands of it. Callisthenes, the historian, who accompanied Alexander the Great on his expeditions, said that Alexander was famous not for what he did but because Callisthenes wrote about his deeds. All historians should contribute the same to the Revolution for Kalos.

Kalotists do not move with history; they are history; they are the historiographers; and they are future history, utopia.11

Utopia

History is the selective story of the past. Utopia is the selective story of the future. Revolution requires its history; it also requires its utopia.

Far easier it is indeed to concentrate on programmes for choosing among lesser evils, even to the point where those evils can scarcely be distinguished, one from the other... Many lawyers, political scientists, and economists occupy themselves by suggesting the minimal changes which are necesary to stand still; yet today this hope is almost invariably disappointed; the status quo proves the most illusory of goals.

So David Riesman, in Individualism Reconsidered.12

There is no clear line of demarcation between reality and dream.

Which of the faiths and illusions of mankind must I choose for my own sustaining light to bring me beyond the present wilderness?13

A man without a utopia is only half a man.

For every wish in life there is a utopia or a place in utopia: a bread conjures up a bread-tree; a slave will be fairy-maid; an official turns into a reasonable scholar. Utopias are projections of visions to another time or area. Both common people and great intellectuals have conjured up utopias: Shangri-la; the land of Cockaigne; the city whose streets are paved with gold; the Republic. They may be primitive or sophisticated. Their intention may be to teach or also to activate, immediately or remotely.

Every large-scale plan is a utopia. The rational plan is practical and may be actualized. It is scientific; it is an urge towards a new order instrumented to realize the order. The most brutally realistic world orders have been based upon utopian concepts. The Huns, the Mongols, and the Nazis inspired peoples whom we would wish not to be inspired at all or to be inspired by other causes. Some of the worst utopias have been the most scientific; they were calculated to succeed.

There have been hundreds, indeed thousands, of utopias, and there have been many that we call dystopias.14 Plato's Republic, Dante's Paradise, Campanella's City of the Sun and Skinner's Walden II have been urged upon us as utopias. For some persons they are utopias; for others they are hell. The dystopias of Dante's Inferno, of E.M.Forster, of H.G. Wells' Time Machine and of Aldous Huxley and George Orwell must be for some a utopia, although they are posited and described as dystopic. Kalocracy will be a hateful utopia, too, for some people; it must be, if it means to change the world.

Is what Marx pictures in his Communist Manifesto a utopia? Is the old liberal model of the free market society and world order a utopia? Is the Constitution of the United States a utopia? Is the Charter of the United Nations a utopia? Yes, all of them are. With the possible exception of the Constitution, which was pointed towards practical and immediate ends, they were unrealizable and unscientific, even though they may have claimed the inevitability of history.

Yet each served the function of positing a future and inspiring millions of people to move towards it. They were schematic and selective in their portrayal of the future, but their unscientific character lay not in that. Rather it is that they visualized a man who did not exist, they eliminated or ignored the undesirable aspects of their means, and they skipped means that were inevitably necessary. Kalos ignores nothing, confesses all, challenges everything, and asserts a completely imaginable dynamic state.

We must conclude with Lewis Mumford that "isolation, stratification, fixation, regimentation, standardization, militarization" are traits of most utopias up to the 20th century. They reveal a type of mind that likes to put everything in place and keep everyone in place. But we say, with Maxim Gorky, "People who have become like wood or stone under the pressure of faith professed by them have never won my sympathies."Kalos is a different utopianism.

Utopias, declared Mumford, began in primordial towns acting under priestly guidance. All was laid out according to a plan of the Gods and in reference to a religious temple that was aligned north and south, or east and west. Even today the final meaning of utopias is celebrated in the rebirth of a primal ordered city, a city of man in his local toparchy and in the city of mankind, his cosmarchy.

It is our task, with all of the science that we are capable of, to present a utopia that is not a boring and detestable paradise, that is not self contradictory, that does not present man as he neiher is not can be. It must not become activated by wicked means that defeat its ends.

In recent years utopias have evolved into models that represent graphically or even mathematically the present and project the present into the future. They are, when they are well done, large-scale applied science.17 Great plans, well designed, whether qualitative or quantitative in their construction and presentation, must still perform the basic functions that a rational utopia must. All too often the model, in its stretching for mathematical perfection, loses the salient traits of the old utopia,which was a psalm, a poem,a vision. There is not need for this. Nor is it desirable.

The poetry of utopia, and of this kalocracy, is the creative formation of the good and the constructive shaping of the uncertain forms of futuristic science. We must have the utopia that units with a rewritten history,and lays open the future by configurative thinking and open-ended inquiry from a full emotive base. As with history, a utopia for kalotic toparchy and cosmarchy has to be newly written.

Pages Torn from the Future

When the history of Kalos will have been written and acted,its pages can be scanned, and, pausing here and there, we shall read of matters such as these:

Kalotic utopia affirms a creative will that is both in and beyond experience... (This affirmation of "divinity" is a foundation for all, and some may move more intensively and explicitly in its direction.)..... The religious idea in the new world must be a constructive force, not retarding nor retarded... There grows up a world shared pneumos, a celebrated spiritual presence, and an end to peoples singing separatistic songs against each other).

All formulate uniquely their own kalotic, principles of Organization and Conduct, of Freedom and Order. A marvelous ourpouring of individual potential is witnessed. The world is of many cultures, distinct and autonomous...

Each group and people has its own Kalotic formula,with which it relates to the formula of the world for the achievements of Kalos... These are the marvel of 1,000,000 distinctions equalling I...

The three principles of Kalos -- Emos, Pneumos, Dikeos -- are commemorated from the North Pole and South Pole, from Mount Everest, and from the lowest point of the Philippine Deep. There long enduring radiant piles and synchronized signals form a united arpeggio to be heard throughout the world. It is heard throughout life by the young and old of every land when they wish to tune into their radios...

...The two million settlements of the world hold each five threads of different colors corresponding to the bonds that link each person to the world government - the regional, national, functional, community, and personal bond. And 10 million threads compose the cloth banner of the World Congress.

In the world, there is enough to eat. But once a weak everyone assumes the ritual of eating a basic protein cake made of algae and fish flour to commemorate the solution of the food problem, to remember the billion citizens who were saved from hunger and those throughout the world who are still poor in Kalos.... Ever-ready basic stores of commodities are available at the very lowest prices and on credit through the Kalotic government....

In the world there is much to learn for everyone.... There is a universal correspondence and television school system to that anyone anywhere in the world can post his name and become a student of some kind.... Mobile units go everywhere, diagnosing needs in education and providing counsel and supply....

In the world there is protection and security.... Beyond everything else in the way of health services there are airborne clinics that call periodically everywhere, and that perform all kinds of emergency services....The cargo that the cults of the ancient poor once awaited for their ancestors to bring them really arrives...

An all-nations army of soldiers uses a simple language derived from the most-used languages and their native tongue. It not only maintains law and order but also performs marginal tasks and assures safety to travellers on land and sea and in the air...

The actual Constitution is not a fixed document, though it conforms to a model of Kalocracy. It is a total map of human relations in the world incorporating ideals, rules, practices, and expectations. It is continuously revised, and held in computer storage for instant recall. The official and original version is locked up by consensus-code elements held by each elected representative of the World Congress and/or any toparchic representatives who have revisionary powers.

....The Tutors are those who conduct the policies of Kalos. They evolve from, lead, and return to the people. They are no longer of a certain occupation; all leadership in all walks of life is tutorial...

There is much more to this history of the Year 50, and of the centuries and millenia to come. We spoke originally of the neoterium, the new age, the indefinite far future. We said that this merges with the nature of man; what is eternal in time becomes what is eternal in kind. Now we ask: what is this spirit of existence - this ultimate pneumos, good today and always?