In the previous post we touched on the slow-motion intellectual, spiritual, and civilizational suicide that has been occurring over the past sixty years or so.
Of course, that’s a somewhat arbitrary date, since the roots of the revolution and brutes of the devolution go back to time immemorial, but that’s when the assisted suicide movement openly declared its desire and intention to euthanize Christendom, AKA the West.
Afterwards the struggle went back and forth until we elected our first openly suicidal president in 2008. Since then, the movement has accelerated, but wait a minute! November 8 will determine whether eros or thanatos has the upper hand, and hot dog, it looks like love’s a-winnin’!
Anyway, as we said, since the intellect is free, it is free to destroy itself.
But is this actually freedom? It can only be regarded as such in a cosmos that has been turned upside down and inside out, and drained of all transcendent meaning. In a properly bright-side up, hierarchical cosmos, life and truth are situated above freedom: if there is no truth, nor are we free.
After all, you can’t exercise your freedom if you aren’t alive, nor is freedom good for anything if it isn't teleologically ordered to truth. If not ordered to truth, then we’re not even unfree nor even lost, rather, just the anti-Word incarnate.
Ah, little lads and lasses, I see you’re still starin’ at my fingers. Well, it’s not just love & hate that are always a-wrasslin' and fussin', but Word and anti-Word, and not until, I don’t know, Nietzsche, did the Voice of the Abyss become a movement and not just a diagnosis.
Since then, how many diagnoses have become movements? Paranoia, narcissism, autogynephilia, misandry, hysteria, homosexuality, sociopathy, penis envy… In my lifetime, the DSM has become the Democrat platform.
Anyway, it is only thanks to the Word that man made such remarkable progress beginning only 50,000 years or so ago. In a book that asks the question, What Is Lonergan Up To in Insight, the author writes of how
Insight is usually a relatively permanent acquisition. Once one has understood, that insight may usually be counted on as a background for future learning (Tekippe).
In this regard, insight is quite different from mere memory, in that it suddenly sees the pattern or connection between the parts, at which point the parts can be forgotten, or at least fade into the background.
For example, last night I was watching The Godfather with the boy, and he had the insight that the story of Michael is the same as the story of Walter White: both men start out innocent before breaking bad and turning into monsters.
Regarding insight,
What is true for the individual is also true for the society and the race. Thus the achievements and breakthroughs of one generation become the background insights of the next, allowing a constant forward progress. If this were not so, each generation would have to start from the same place, so the human race would never escape from the Stone Age (ibid.).
Aaaaaand, here we are.
It’s not so much that we’re in the Stone Age. Rather, when the tower of the West comes down, its pieces are dispersed in space. Note, for example, how Obama and now Biden want to ease the way for Iran to obtain nukes, meaning that the highest technology mingles with the lowest barbarism, so it is simultaneously 2022 and 700, and the distance of 13 centuries is eradicated.
In short, we are giving away the insights of Western civilization to civilizations that did not and could not have have come up with them. It's the same when we hand over America to woke proglodytes.
Above we alluded to the intrinsic relationship between freedom and truth. In the West, science flourished only as a consequence of independent minds free to pursue it in a disinterested way. To put it mildly, this is not how Iran acquired its scientific knowledge.
Now, once seen, one cannot “unsee” the rug that pulls the cosmos together. However it is possible for someone to steal or destroy the rug, in which case we are plunged back into a room or perhaps even toilet full of random stuff with no connection to unify it.
Who stole the rug? I think you possess sufficient insight to figure that out on your own.
6 comments:
After all, you can’t exercise your freedom if you aren’t alive, nor is freedom good for anything if it isn't teleologically ordered to truth. If not ordered to truth, then we’re not even unfree nor even lost, rather, just the anti-Word incarnate.
There's a great illustration of this truism in the story of Saul (the first king of Israel). Anointed, granted essentially the freedom of freedoms, it doesn't take long before he turns away from the One who elevated him, then actively works against Him, and finally in an act of utter hopelessness offs himself before his enemies can do it for him.
As to the circumstances in which we find ourselves today, The Gods of the Copybook Headings would like a word with the wokesters who think they can run things...
It's interesting to consider the civilizational view you describe in this post, to the individual view. What I mean is that though I was brought up in The Word, and had experienced insights from this upbringing, there was a period of time in my life when I did my utmost to deny the insights I had gained from being brought up in The Word. This is not to say that someone has to be brought up in The Word in order to experience the insight of belief in Yahweh Elohim from an early age in order to begin climbing verticaly, think thief on the cross or the parable of the vineyard workers, but as you noted, over the past 60 or more years it seems that the message of salvation has been further and further obscured, and the fact of the anti-word, the devil, has also been obscured though at the same time elevated as is evidenced by the evils which are now preached as normal. As to is this the fault of Nietzche, though Nietzche did seem to mainstream the idea of the super-ego and that God is dead, he simply made it somewhat less reprehensible to claim that there is no God, and moved forward the idea of the devil made me do it, so it ain't all bad, because if God is dead so is the devil, so why worry about it. Is it any wonder that The Messiah was overwhelmed with compassion for the people because they were so lost and didn't even realize it? Does He think it is worse now than it was 2000 years ago? I do not know, but I know that I think the blatant elevation of evil in our day is worse.
The majority of new customs are old behaviors that Western civilization had shamefacedly confined to its lower-class neighborhoods.
Michael and Walter White are anti-heroes, which today may just be "heroes" or protagonists since virtues matter less and power more.
Interesting how the left turns heroes into antiheroes (e.g., the founders) and antihero scumbags into heroes (e.g., George Floyd).
Are all antiheroes just so many masks of the Serpent? Interestingly, in the Godfather, Michael renounces Satan and his works at the very moment he is "settling all the family business."
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