As a cheery reflection! - as I read through histories and early accounts of the problem of the collapse of The West; it does begin to seem that everything has - by now, somewhere or another - been tried and has failed as solutions.
The problem seems to lie too deep to be addressed - it lies, indeed, in changes in the nature of actual human beings, en masse; and it has to do with the nature of human groups, the relation of the individual with the collective.
Humans used to be effortlessly, because intrinsically, semi-collective beings - like it or like-it-not, we participated in the life of the group; and conceptualized ourselves thus.
Such participation was inevitably religious - except for a brief (one generation?) transitional semi-religion that could be called "nationalism".
That doesn't happen any more. The 20th century replacement of group participation and religion was totalitarianism - which is top-down brainwashing, surveillance and group-control by massive propaganda, censorship, with bureaucratic linkage of all institutions/ organizations/ corporations etc (including treating the family, legally and in public discourse, as if it was an institution).
Totalitarianism has been, increasingly for about a century, the basis of Western Civilization - yet totalitarianism is visibly failing, by the week.
Thus, totalitarianism is no longer an option. yet all suggested and imaginable alternatives are tried-and-failed (as well as being essentially unwanted by the masses - who have by-now lost all positive and strong life-motivations).
Western man (and increasingly all human beings) just are individuals - that is the fact of it: that is how we are built to experience the world and ourselves.
The collective is feeble, and getting feebler - because it cannot positively motivate us - and double-negative motivations are destroying the civilization with accelerating rapidity.
So -- collapse of The West (and maybe world society) is baked-in, accelerating; and attempts to avert it make things worse in the long term (indeed, often immediately); and there are no valid alternatives that will sustain The West - even in theory!
It might seem obvious that it is time to move on to other themes!
With zero possibility of large scale communal life - then we ought to be orientating away from it, surely?
Instead; the search for a political-communal answer gets more desperate - even as it gets lazier, less rigorous, less truthful - more superficial.
Hand-waving doesn't being to describe the pathetic plans and schemes that are floated, propagated, defended - with an aggressive emotionality that (quite obviously!) merely disguises a deep weakness of conviction.
Yet, honestly conceived, all this is extraordinarily liberating; and points towards the necessity of a life that is more wholly creative in its fundamental nature, than anything that was possible (or desirable) at any earlier point in human history.
But (it seems to me) that this is only possible in the context of a Christian faith that has itself discarded the assumptions of earlier, top-down and bureaucratic religion.
In other words, we first need to recognize in our hearts that Christianity is/ salvation is/ theosis is (and always was meant to be) ultimately, a personal and individual and creative matter.
We are not only much freer than we realize, we are much freer than most people want or are prepared to acknowledge; nonetheless, incrementally, the reality of that freedom is being forced upon us by circumstance.
That is partly because people have become distractible and dishonest about regarding freedom as a political - hence external - concept... As some-thing that can be taken-from-us.
But the freedom that matters eternally, is the kind that cannot be taken away; or, to put it positively; we are free whether we like it or not.
The profound freedom of the creative life or "genius quest" emerges naturally and irresistibly from that recognition.
No comments:
Post a Comment