A response to Bruce Charlton's recent essay.


I keep coming back to this essay. I think Bruce Charlton is right, this world is self destructing out of a deeper wisdom that it is seriously sick and evil.

But on a personal level, forgetting for a moment the plans of such a wisdom, we are still living in this world, and our lives here and now have a purpose other than to destroy ourselves.

We must still live a worthy life.

Yes, this civilisation is clearly incoherent, dysfunctional, and evil. Therefor it cannot be participated in without extreme rejection of what is true and good.

If that is the case, aside from taking a blue pill, how does one then live in this world?

Is it up to me to conjure a better narrative for life out of myself?

Final participation seems to suggest so.

Owen Barfield said (emphasis mine)

“Not to realize to the uttermost the otherness of God from ourselves is to deny the Father. But equally, not to strive to realize the sameness—to renege from the Supreme Identity—is to deny the Holy Spirit. This, any deeply religious man may feel, whatever terminology he may have learnt to employ. To this a true Christian—or so it seems to me—must add: In no way to relate the former with the past, and the latter with the future of the world, is to seek to deprive history, and perhaps time itself, of all religious significance.”

I understand this to mean; The logos has transformed itself from an outer to an inner origin.

This means that in final participation the rules (the logos) are not given outwardly. They must come from one's own thinking intuition.

Never a better opportunity, then, to reject the outer narratives that are behind the structure of our modern society, and live according to the truth as is revealed by inner intuition.

The difficulty is obviously; what the hell do I know about how to live?! Can my intuition really be the source?

Well, like it or not, you are already doing it. How else would you be able to judge society as being sick and evil, unless there was already some inner datum that told you so?

In the Image of the Machine

Our society views the human being in the image of the machine. Perhaps that is why so many have accepted the lock-down without much fuss.

To such a view-point, locking-down the entire world until the virus burns itself out is an obvious solution. In fact, if it saves lives this is the only moral thing to do.

Now a machine can be isolated from other machines and put on stand-by indefinitely, and then re-booted again to operate just as normal, as if nothing had happened. A human being, however, cannot. And we are about to witness the consequences of assuming otherwise.

For the reality is that we are not machines, and to someone who sees that civilisation is fundamentally held together, not by the machinery of bureaucratic rules and armies of police forces, but by real-world relationships between individual people, all supported by a myriad of common customs, traditions and mutual agreements, will see in concepts such as social distancing and the indefinite suspension of the right to assembly something far more sinister than anything a virus could cause.

Scientism

Scientism is the belief that science will inform morality and ethics.

On closer scrutiny, scientism is actually the end of all morality and ethics.  For once one has the data, the correct action is already determined. The science determines the action. There is no interpretation between the data and the action. Interpretation is not an aspect of scientism. Interpretation opens the door for personal perspective and value judgements - which are anathema to scientism.

Traditionally, burning books in the street was the revolutionary way of eradicating the past in order to usher in some Utopian fantasy.

But the modern revolution has no need of fire, for our modern mindset has made the language of the past so repugnant to our sensibility that we simply ignore the literature of the past on grounds of "out-datedness".