Sober Thinking...

October 13, 2005

...on a religious subject that cultivates wild inebriation. Every culture has had a vision of the Beginning of Things and the End of Things. Michael O'Brien, a devout Catholic author, reflects at length on our own.  

He cites Etienne Gilson in 1948 warning the bishops of France about the nature of the postwar world, regarding:

...the appalling cataclysm of the "reversal of values" which is in the making, for if the totality of the human past depended on the certitude that God exists, the totality of the future must needs depend on the contrary certitude, that God does not exist. . . .

Have we understood at last? That is not certain, because the announcement of a cataclysm of such magnitude ordinarily leaves but a single escape: to disbelieve it, and in order not to believe, to refuse to understand it. If Nietzsche speaks truly, it is the very foundations of human life which are to be overthrown. . . .

"He who would be a creator, both in good and evil, must first of all know how to destroy and wreck values" [Nietzsche writes]. They are, in fact, being wrecked around us, and under our very feet, everywhere. We have stopped counting the unheard of theories thrown at us under names as various as their methods of thought, each the harbinger of a new truth which it promises to create shortly, joyously busy preparing the brave new world of tomorrow by first annihilating the world of today. . .

O'Brien updates Gilson:

How will our enslavement be accomplished? It will be accomplished by increasing the voltage of state power combined with a gradual decreasing of civil rights, the lifting of burdensome responsibilities from our shoulders combined with the increase of pleasurable rewards, the growth of a power class of “knowers”, who enshrine a multi-faceted gnosticism in organs of institutional governance. If at the same time, man’s ability to exercise his healthy critical and analytical faculties has been limited by corrupt education, by media indoctrination, and by a generalized loss of the sense of human identity, the new world order can be achieved—and achieved most effectively, it should be noted, to the degree that it is understood as a “moral” cause, a great leap forward in the name of humanity.

As O'Brien observes, all times seem normal, if difficult, to people living in them. At some point, according to the overview from which he works, a time will come that reverses normality. Without paying close attention, we may may still see the discontinuity as normal.

When the landmarks tilt, it may be time to buy a compass.

Courtesy Diogenes