I've done it myself often enough; but nonetheless I am dismayed by the many people who currently seek guidance for present action and strategy from historical parallels.
Including in the case of our Christian religion.
When Ecclesiastes said "there is nothing new under the sun", he may have been right for his time and place, but he is dead wrong about here-and-now. Cherry picked, distorted and partial historical parallels are misleading.
There has never been anything like the world now - this eight billion industrialized globalized totalitarian world - with its strategically evil, demon-affiliated multi-national rulers and their fingertip-ready capacity for military, economic, financial, legal, religious, environmental and other destructions - and their command of a colossal and coordinated mass media to which the masses are willingly addicted and from which they derive ideological and everyday guidance.
The world is different, and people are different.
There have never been such human beings as there are now. Anyone who knows history should be able to see that people have desires and exhibit behaviours, respond (and fail to respond) in ways that even four generations ago would have been regarded as alien and insane.
But argument is futile. If you don't see such huge differences between here-and-now and anywhere-else at any time, then nothing I can say will persuade you.
This difference is why - no matter how genuinely well-meaning you are (by which I mean how genuinely Christian are your aspirations); to sift through the past for traditional guidance of what to do from where we are, is doomed to failure - and likely to do harm.
Before we can do anything good, we must first understand who we are and where we stand.
That is possible to attain - at least in a broad sense; but not if we are determined to discover our understanding in the past, in some other civilization.
There is no realistic alternative but to make the effort to understand things as they actually are. Perspectives derived from study of the past and other places may be helpful, may contain clues... but The Answer is not there to be found.
We cannot get the recipe for a Good Future from what has-been. At best we may get some ingredients needed for a good answer - but it's just as likely vital ingredients may be found elsewhere (e.g. in literature, art, real-science, and from our enemies), and almost certainly some key ingredient will be new, unprecedented.
The Answer we hope for is something that must be created - not discovered.
2 comments:
it still surprises me how few self styled dissidents actually understand how profoundly insane and diabolic the world is today.
you wrote four generations but i am absolutely sure that, had i shown some of the things people in my family now take for granted as normal to themselves even, say, twenty years ago, they would think i was the insane one for suggesting it would actually be true - and much more so that they would think it normal!
@Laeth: "how few self styled dissidents actually understand how profoundly insane and diabolic the world is today"
Very true, and that in itself indicates that the self-styled dissidents are not genuinely dissident...
In the sense of them being primarily and core motivated by this-worldly hedonism (i.e. they desire happiness and freedom from suffering in this mortal life as their highest aspiration) - which is the same root ideology as those who support left-totalitarianism.
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