Tag: modernity

Amid the Absurdity of Clownworld: How Should We Then Live?

By Doug “Uncola” Lynn via TheBurningPlatform.com

 

I believe people are as they think. The choice we make in the next decade will mold irrevocably the direction of our culture… and the lives of our children.

– Author and theologian Francis A. Schaeffer in 1976

 

The picture at the top of this article shows one of America’s founding fathers according to Google’s Gemini image generation tool.  Pursuant to complaints about the blatant inaccuracy and the ensuing maelstrom of negative press coverage, Google claimed it was “actively working on a fix”. Nonetheless, there remain claims that Google is “not telling the truth” and the company will never give up on its “desire to reshape the world in a specific way”.

Indeed.  It appears artificial intelligence, woke relativism, and Orwell’s “two plus two equaling five” are here to stay. And the “memory hole” first conjured by Orwell has increasingly manifested in The Borg’s nearly completed Simulacrum – as misinformation, false flags, and propaganda daily populate our collective screens.

With that in mind, amid the absurdity of Western culture in the twenty-first century, I will often seek credible information and insights where they are more surely found: in the printed past, and by the words of authors and researchers mostly forgotten.

Having written previously on the prescient prognostications of twentieth-century thinkers like C.S. Lewis and Augusto Del Noce, another book was recommended by a commenter in the thread of my last article.  The book was said to have predicted the decline of empirical science, the rise of technological science, and a frightening future.

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The Metaphysics Underlying The Sunset of the West

By Doug “Uncola” Lynn via TheBurningPlatform.com

 

There is a way that seems right to a man, but its end is the way of death.

-Proverbs 16:25

 

The heart is deceitful above all things…

-Jeremiah 17:9

 

When small men cast big shadows, it means the sun is setting.

– Lin Yutang, Chinese philosopher

 

Upon the recommendation of a blog commenter, I recently read “The Crisis of Modernity”  by Italian professor and philosopher, Augusto Del Noce (1910 – 1989).  The book was published in 2014 and is a brilliant compilation of twentieth-century essays and speeches by Del Noce.  His philosophical insights are profound and his conclusions and societal predictions, especially regarding Scientism and the Technocracy, are eerily similar to those of English author and theologian C.S. Lewis  – see my previous posts entitled “The Abolition of Man Amid the Consequences of Reality”,  and “Gnostic Parasitism in the Post-Modern Simulacrum”, and “A Postmortem on Postmodernism”.

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WORLDS MADE BY HAND

Having recently finished reading The Harrows of Spring, the fourth and final novel of Jim Kunstler’s World Made By Hand series, I couldn’t help but compare and contrast his dystopian post economic collapse America versus our current warped egocentric pre-economic collapse America. His world made by hand is forced upon Americans who have survived some sort of conflict resulting in the destruction of Washington D.C. and Los Angeles by nuclear blasts.

The Federal government has ceased to exist. The nation has splintered and varied factions are vying for power in autonomous regions of the country, but the small community of Union Grove, New York has been left to fend for itself. The four novels detail the trials and tribulations of average Americans in a small rural town after the implosion of modernity, as the world is stripped of its technological oil based comforts, devastated by terrorism, racked by epidemics, and having endured the ravages of economic collapse.

Kunstler’s dystopian future isn’t as bleak as the dystopian visions of 1984 or Brave New World. If dystopian means a world characterized by dehumanization, totalitarian governments, environmental disaster, or a cataclysmic decline in society, then Kunstler’s World Made By Hand series doesn’t match that characterization. There is more humanity and hope in his novels than you would expect in a dystopian vision of the future. The novels focus on various types of societal segments who represent the different courses society could chart after a breakdown of modern social norms, enforced by central authorities. Living through a national catastrophe and stripped of the modern conveniences provided by cheap plentiful oil, the citizens of Union Grove see their community falling apart from neglect, natural decay, disease, and lack of hope for the future.

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