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When comparing successful writers from two generations ago - the likes of JRR Tolkien and CS Lewis - with a near-equivalent from now - JK Rowling - I am struck by the fact that Rowling's personality is highly fragmented and grossly inconsistent by comparison with her predecessors.
So that Rowling's world view in the context of the Harry Potter books is grossly at-odds with her personality as expressed in interviews etc; while Tolkien and Lewis are 'all-of-a-piece' - all their works in different genres, their letters and interviews and biography, very obviously amount to a self-consistent and integrated world view.
What I find interesting is that Rowling's world view in the Harry Potter books is both self-consistent and also broadly consistent with Tolkien's and Lewis's world views (although relatively simplified) - and it is the 'public persona, the non-literary world view which is so sharply at odds.
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Indeed it is very characteristic of modernity that people have fragmented, unintegrated world views.
The world view in their work is inconsistent with their world view as private individuals; their political views are inconsistent and changeable, their motivations do not match their explicit aspirations, and so on.
This is unsurprising in that modern life is (or was) composed of specialist social systems, each with different rules and languages - and these tended to evolve away from each other. So that science focused almost exclusively on Truth - which became operationalized in terms of replicable facts and approved methods; art became focused on aesthetic factors - which became operationalized in terms of theory; the media became focused on attention grabbing - and so on.
And of course Tolkien and Lewis both regarded themselves as 'dinosaurs' - out of step with the fragmented and specialized world of modernity which surrounded them, throwbacks to a much earlier (pre-Renaissance) style of thinking and being.
And they were pretty much the last representatives of that style - except for some few people operating in enclosed and detached religious groups (I am thinking of Fr Seraphim Rose), who do not impinge on mainstream culture.
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On the other hand, political correctness represents a kind of re-integration of world views: so that all the social systems are currently being re-integrated in terms first of being made consistent with political correctness, then being motivated by political correctness.
So, for instance, arts and sciences are no longer either aesthetically-motivated/ truth-motivated but these are now subordinated to the motivations of political correctness.
One might expect that this would lead to a re-emergence of the integrated personality - except that political correctness is itself grossly incoherent, continually changing, and indeed oppositional and reactive rather than propositional and substantive.
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Where good work is still being done, as with the Harry Potter novels, then this is always non-politically correct insofar as it is good.
Yet, at a personal level, the penalties for being non-PC get greater and greater - so we still see (as with JK Rowling) gross fragmentation of personality; such that the ability to hold-by and be-adept-in multiple incompatible ways of thinking and world views is now adaptive, sophisticated - almost 'common sensical'.
So that if JKR expressed views views that were consistent with the world view of HP, she would be a social pariah - a hate figure - and the novels would be suppressed by one means or another. So the best that she can do (whether intentionally or by instinct) is to smuggle the world view out in the form of a novel (as, indeed, a kid's novel), hidden by a veneer of PC - and to ensure that never at any time does she follow through the logic of the novels into her public persona.
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Of course there is a price to pay.
JKR comes across as immature, vapid and evasive in her interviews and essays, compared with the tremendous adult solidity and gravitas of Tolkien and Lewis.
But she is in good company. Everybody in public life comes across as immature, vapid and evasive: because that is precisely what they are.
Worryingly, almost everybody in private life now comes across as immature, vapid and evasive - because it has become habitual (it has had-to become habitual, since the cost of failing to be dis-integrated is so high).
The triumph of political correctness is that we always feel asif Big Brother is watching us. A social grouping of unselfconscious truth seekers and truth tellers such as The Inklings would be almost impossible nowadays.
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(I should point out that Tolkien and Lewis are vastly more intelligent and knowledgeable than Rowling, or indeed than anyone else in modern public life - and Tolkien more intelligent than Lewis, Lewis more knowledgeable than Tolkien - but this is not mainly a matter of intelligence and knowledge. It is primarily a matter of partly-trained and partly-habitual honesty; and underneath that a grounding in reality. Reality regarded as real.)
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The consequence of all this is that moderns are incapable people. At most they can operate with technical adeptness within small, grossly-incomplete and hermetically-sealed specialist worlds - they are dogmatic technicians.
But most moderns are even worse than that because they lack technical expertise of any kind - this being continually stopped short or diverted by the over-riding application of political correctness - so that even very simple causal chains of a purely technical nature become disrupted whenever they get anywhere near human applicability (or else their human applicability is denied, and the activity thereby neutered).
And this is why modern humans cannot solve any problems anymore.
All they can do, all we can do, is reframe things so that they are no longer perceived as a problem: we simply redefine threats as - what is the jargon? - opportunities.
Transcendental inversion, again
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And such is the fragmentation of thought and the dis-integration of world views that the gross insanity of the process is concealed.
Fragmentation leads to more fragmentation, until...
Everything falls apart.
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