Between the Heavenly City and the Lake of Fire
Painting Ourselves Into a Corner with a Spray Gun
In today's video I try to think a bit about what feels like the self-extinction of the human race.
Two recent clear voices on this were brought together by Rebel Wisdom for dialogue: Paul Kingsnorth and Mary Harrington .
The first meeting was about diagnosis. The second promised at the end of the first was about "solutions" or "resolution" or at least a way forward. That conversation happened recently but has not been published. As is common, disease is easier to diagnose than to address.
I did take notes. "We are not in control of what's going on."
"There's a giant superstructure taking on a life of its own"
"The ultimate aim of this thing is to allow us to conquer nature, to rebuild it in our own image."
"It's a vanity project that's both accelerating and collapsing at the same time."
"Framing it as right and left doesn't really work."
These from Paul Kingsnorth.
Mary Harrington
"fully automated luxury Gnosticism",
"War on the given, anything emergent or organic, controlled by humans."
"War on ourselves, the givens of our bodies."
“Meat-Lego Gnosticism”
This gnosticism for me is connected with the secret-sacred self. The "real me" increasingly detached from my history, my physiology, my body, the lower-register restraints of my story.
A part of the @vervaeke_john meaning crisis is the result of "me" instrumentalizing the world only to discover to my horror that I, according to the modern story am too a product of instrumentalities. When it comes to "me" there is no there there.
The secret-sacred-self is therefore a keep, a bastion, a place where my "me" is NOT a product of evolution, psychology, sociology, marketing, but rather something holy, set apart from the plodding of the world-machine, as CS Lewis calls it "the whole show".
The reactive way out appears to be a total "no" to "technology", but that is equally a dream. Ever since we started to control fire we have had a symbiotic relationship with technique. "Naked and Afraid" is a game show, not a way forward.
One of my most important take-aways I've gained from Jonathan Pageau is the observation that Cain, the first murder, is the first city builder and the Biblical story ends WITH a city. City building gets redeemed.
The analogy is use of CGI in story telling, recently critiqued by The Critical Drinker
We are unable to effectively wield the blank canvas of CGI. We over-reach, we avoid sacrifice which is essential to navigating our fallenness. Technology is used as an escape from the need to sacrifice but it is a cheat.
Technology often conceals, shifts, smuggles the sacrifice often into an externality, making someone else pay the cost of sacrifice. It's the carbon, the coal, the hydro, the sweat shops that sacrifice so we don't have to. It's the delusion of a free lunch.
But technology is as necessary and inevitable as sacrifice because they are the same. The economy is just more subtle, more hidden. This is connected to the meaning crisis. We ARE products of sacrifice.
What we get wrong is that the world is NOT just "the whole show". The REAL is the meeting of heaven and earth. We are the breath of God and the stuff of earth. Getting that right is the way forward. We are not doing well.
The arrival of the city of God is inevitable. There is also a strange, dark lake of fire where there is weeping and gnashing of teeth. Some caution might be in order.
Between the Heavenly City and the Lake of Fire
some words of Iain McG - "I believe that we are engaged in committing suicide: intellectual suicide, moral suicide and physical suicide. If there is anything as important as stopping us poisoning our seas and destroying our forests, it is stopping us poisoning our minds and destroying our souls.
Our dominant value – sometimes I fear our only value – has, very clearly, become that of power. This aligns us with a brain system, that of the left hemisphere, the raison d’être of which is to control and manipulate the world. "
I have been following the mighty saga of Jordan Peterson, Rebel Wisdom, Paul VanderKlay, Jonathon Pageau, Paul Vervaeke, Paul Kingsnorth
et al since 2017 and my life has been enriched and sustained by so much wisdom and sharing while I live my hum drum life of solitude in a retirement village.
All those wise men shedding light on the problems of the world while a captive audience applauded.
After all the excitement what do we discover now?
Is it jealousy, pride, disappointment or fear of the future that causes a reaction like this from David Fuller?
Maybe plain old sadness that Ollie has gone tripping off into drippy hippy heaven.
Meanwhile those with a more healthy inclination are getting on with forming estuaries, building bridges and creating communities based on agape love.