Mrs du Toit has a brilliant post up regarding the unnamed men in history, the “Remnant” as she labels them, and how they play into the flow of history. Along the way she brings up some brilliant insights not only into our nations history but also into our perception of it, and how it is reflected in many of the current political ideas and proposed solutions being offered today.
It is the Remnant that carries the baton, differentiated from everyone else (as Nock describes) by quality, rather than numbers or circumstance. And as Nock further detailed in his essay, we have no idea how many there were, how they accomplished what they did with any certainty, but those of us who spend time looking at the great Gantt Chart of man’s existence know that they had to be there.
They’re the ones who taught their children to say please and thank you. They’re the ones who made up the fairy tales to soothe a child’s nightmare to help a child transition from awake to sleep. They’re the ones who showed up for the barn raisings, carried fire buckets to a neighbor’s barn fire, blew the horn or beat the drum when the Barbarians were at the gates, and didn’t think twice about leading other men in a charge up a hill, into a stream, or over a barricade to keep the Barbarians at bay. They muddled along, not as individuals, but as members of a kind of collective or secret society, bonded, and well aware of their duties and responsibilities to others, fully recognizing that they were not important as individual, autonomous persons, but only as a member of a greater community of humane-kind.
Her stuff is always good, but this one left me gasping for breath.