The simple answer is that the anti-establishment counter-culture went-into novels, plays, poems, visuals, TV, movies and online.
In media there are endless totalitarian dystopias, insightful eccentrics, and self-sacrificing heroes. The masses live this intensely and vicariously.
But in Real Life among the masses there is unprecedented lying, conformity and cowardice; bland self-blinding and denial complicity in the construction of a global Black Iron Prison dedicated to evil.
So much for the educative role of the arts; so much for the inspirational effect of examples, so much for being forewarned by history, so much for more education and wide availability of detailed information...
And so much for the Christian Churches with all their teaching, expertise in theology and scripture, their extensive rituals, their restrictive rules, their sacraments, prayers and communities.
2020 has exposed our vast systems of delusion, false claims, errors and pretense with unprecedented suddenness and completeness.
What we thought we knew about the world and our-selves - we now know that we did not; and there is nowhere left to turn for discernment and motivation... but God, our own hearts and (perhaps) one or a handful of beloved persons.
It's like a ruined and crashed life. All the songs sang, poems read and written, all this things liked and loved, all those projects, all those accomplishments and all those "learning experiences", all that was had and done and done again in earnest as if it important once...
ReplyDeleteAnd we sit aside the wreckage and wonder: after all that, none of it saved me from.....this. All those heady documents, all those graves of heroes... this.
There's a touch of liberation at such depths.
It's not that the Arts are useless or without value. It's that there's some spiritual gap between seeing the inspiring, heart-warming symbol of a thing, and actually "plugging it in" to one's worldview of reality. Ie. taking our electronic dreams seriously. We the People yearn for what is True and Right in our fantasies and daydreams - electronic or personal - but we do not understand that our yearnings are actually Real. We don't take our inner life seriously enough. It has something to do with belief in God and Heaven, the heart, the soul, and the mind. What excruciations torment us inwardly and privately are not just inward and private. We are not truly separate; we only feel that way, and it might well be a false, temporary feeling.
ReplyDeleteThe inward is as real as the outward. I guess that's the truth all modernity is devoted to blocking from us. The yearning for love, infinite love, the closest connection, is not childish, shameful, or embarrassing, but it touches the most sensitive part of us.
@Epi - I disagree. "The Arts", as opposed to specific works of art, are not just useless but actively evil-promoting overall; and have been for at least two generations (fifty plus years). Just go to a mainstream bookshop, look at the plays or cinema lists, listen to the average music, read award winning and best selling novels, consider the oeuvre of the most prestigious authors... It is not subtle.
ReplyDeleteOne of the things that has happened is that the masses regard media as real life, and real life as psychodrama. But the reason they do this is that they are become Hollow Men, from whom true-religious conviction (including natural religion) has been deleted; and who have thus lost even basic biological functionality (survival, defense, reproduction etc.).