Modernity

Last night I dreamed I was a drunk Indian, passed out on a train bound for I knew not where.  Imagine this feeling they must have felt: everything they knew, everything they loved, gone.  Families split, land gone.  What we did to them was not that different than what the Communists have done to the populations they have conquered the world over.  As an ideology, Communism is much worse than Christianity, but in terms of the practical effects, the reservations were not different in principle, at least for long stretches of time, than concentration camps.

This morning I was meditating, and it popped in to my head than many of us have a form of Stockholm Syndrome.  We KNOW, on some level, that the process of (purportedly) “rationalizing” everything has the effect of diminishing the quality of our lives.  We KNOW that the phrase “there’s a scientific explanation for that”, offered reflexively by the intellectually compulsive, acts to diminish the quality of our experience.

Now, as I have said often, I offer no objection to science and empiricism per se. I believe that the facts of non-local communication between consciousnesses, and the survival of physical death by consciousness can be empirically verified.  These hypotheses can be offered up to experimental test, and pass.

What I mean is that many people see no means of escape from the iron bars of materialism apparently linked to “rationalism”, so they willingly cooperate in their own intellectual and emotional enslavement to a fundamentally pessimistic and flawed creed.  They become apostles of scientism.

And this leads to emotional withering.  The aesthetic contemplation of scientific truth is in no way equal to, much less superior to, the notions that we are all intrinsically connected, that our lives have a purpose beyond simply living and dying, and that, importantly, the quality of our emotional experience is every bit as important as the quality of our rational thought, and scientific accuracy.  Call it Yin and Yang if you like: a WELL LIVED life includes both.

We have lost this sense of wonder rooted in the very soles of our feet, that goes far beyond mere pleasure to PARTICIPATION.  There is no room for it in modern Scientism.  It is “irrational”.

I was accused at one point of being a Romantic. In some ways this is true, but I am not attracted to the great and heroic, at least perhaps the way I once was.  I am attracted to the mundane and true.  I am attracted to belonging, and common culture, and peace.  I am attracted to sufficient wealth that life can be made an art form.

I am attracted to the effective use of reason as a TOOL within a broader world view, one which seeks to reach the level of myth in helpful and nourishing ways, but not the fetishization of “logic”.  [I will note, in that regard, that my model for philosophy is the geometric proof; this remains the case, but as I have said, philosophy is what you do on the way to something else.]