Wednesday 19 June 2019

Mapping the sexual revolution - by Frank Berger

Frank Berger has provided a detailed, stepwise account of the sexual revolution during the past half century or so.

In course of explaining the spiritual causes of what is going on in Western Societies, he references Rudolf Steiner's 1918 prophecy (contained in Work of the Angels in Man's Astral Body) that I have discussed often on this blog.

In terms of prophecy, I would add the short dystopian novella Night Operation by Owen Barfield (1975) - a section of which can be seen here.

In short, Barfield was aware that human sexuality was likely to become perverted, inverted and evil - as a matter of official approval and public policy. Significantly, Barfield was a co-translator of the Steiner 1918 lecture.

3 comments:

Francis Berger said...

I appreciate the share, Bruce. Steiner's lecture and the prophecy it contained affected me greatly, and I owe you thanks for bringing attention to it on this blog.

As I traced the sexual inversion through the timeline of my own life, it was quite disturbing to remember how effortlessly I had just gone with the flow most of the time, even when I knew the flow was corrupt/evil.

As I mentioned in my post, I did not begin repenting until about ten or eleven years ago, which means that as far as sexual morality goes, I had gone with the flow more than half of my adult life.

Matthew T said...

I must thank you, Bruce, as well as Francis, for this post, as despite your consistent writing on the topic it's taken me till now to "get" the significance of what Steiner was saying.

(You must also forgive me if I'm a little less sharp tonight than I might like, as I am camping with my five-year-old on a boys-only trip, and am literally posting this from inside a tent, in the wilds of Canada!)

Anyway I had at least 3 thoughts on the topic:

First is that I'm glad to see, I find it reassuring on some level, to see an accounting of what's been going on from what I might call a "systematic" perspective. That is to say, we always knew, in a vague or general sense, that sexuality was a spiritually-charged issue, but *how* exactly that has such a positive or negative effect on a whole society is not always clearly explained.

The way that, for example, somewhere about the mid-late 2000s society shifted en masse, all at once(!) towards an ethic of radical endorsement of sexual heterodoxy, always struck me as something that must have had spiritual origins, yet was never clear exactly how this might have "worked". Steiner offers an explanation.

The second thing I have to say has to do with the Roman Catholic Church. Now of course you are not Catholic, and nor am I for that matter, but I do have a great deal of respect for some of the RCC's less popular stances, particularly as they relate to sexuality. In particular, I have always been fond of Humanae Vitae and have regarded it as so prescient that it must have been divinely-inspired in some regard. The point is that, when he forecasted what would happen if mankind did not opt for the "right choice", then like Steiner, Pope Paul was evidently tapping into a spiritual insight that actually exists and is available to mankind.

The third is, to comment on something Francis said specifically, about how it has taken him this long to see what is wrong, as it were, and reject the mainstream / dominant narrative - well, isn't that encouraging rather than otherwise? You've got someone who just... went along with it all for a long time, and suddenly saw the light. It's not that I see tremendous signs of hope, exactly; and yet, I do see more and more people saying, look, it's gone too far.

Of course what is needed is for those people to begin looking and seeing where it all began, and rejecting it all back to the beginning.

Bruce Charlton said...

@Matthew - Thanks for that.

" isn't that encouraging rather than otherwise? " - It is a glass half full/ empty kind of thing. It reaffirms the Christian (esepcially evangelical) conviction that repentance can come at any moment, and for some this requires being brought very low. On the other hand, or rather the same thing from the different persepctive, it shows that it is very difficult for someone to a akaen and repent - it may take decades, and it may also *never* happen - no matter how extreme the 'evidence' becomes.