You can see it only in flashes or small intuitions, because the entire world that surrounds us and fills us on the inside has been put together with the explicit intention of making you point in the opposite direction. But still brief and precious as they are, they will never leave you. They are real in a way nothing else is.
Ruskin and Mumford characterised raw materialism and their purveyors as the production of “illth”. Waste not your time, they will never be able to either extract or see Delight from it. Let’s give them an example instead, this they can understand.
Take for instance: “they didn’t have a written history”, which is an immediate absurdity, and of course false, causing among other things a physical effect. Correct statement: “they didn’t need a written history (i.e. they were Such)”, still false obviously, but shedding a bit of light on something relevant. Something we cannot see, even less understand, but it helps one get free of its shackles, and that’s the entire point. A standpoint is not an ideology nor a worldview, it’s a centre. From there all sorts of different worlds spin up, a different way to approach realty in its entirety. And this is from just one single sentence. The biggest lie of our era is “Everything is the same, there are no standpoints”, no, nothing is the same; different, incommensurable universes lie behind each and every possibility, behind every act. History is not so much the world of being as the world of what could have been. Every act of history is in its essence accidental. The further you go back in time, the further history develops, the more you advance the more it contracts. (The symbolic is just an attempt at the realisation of history in time, it is a way to capture its force un-mediated, in the act proper.)
Everything existed so we could exist. We, who are the absolute negation to Them. Modern corollary: We don’t exist.
We deny them being in order ourselves to be. This world exalts the major, is unaware of the minor, and obviously heads to the conclusion.
Thank you as always.
“Value, in the doctrine of progress, was reduced to a time-calculation: value was in fact movement in time. To be old-fashioned or to be ‘out of date’ was to lack value. Progress was the equivalent in history of mechanical motion through space: it was after beholding a thundering railroad train that Tennyson exclaimed, with exquisite aptness, ‘Let the great world spin forever down the ringing grooves of change.’ The machine was displacing every other source of value partly because the machine was by its nature the most progressive element in the new economy.
What remained valid in the notion of progress were two things that had no essential connection with human improvement. First: the fact of life, with its birth, development, renewal, decay, which one might generalize, in such a fashion as to include the whole universe, as the fact of change, motion, transformation of energy. [See yours and The Mother statement] Second: the social fact of accumulation: that is the tendency to augment and conserve those parts of the social heritage which lend themselves to transmission through time. [See SJ Gould on biological change]. No society can escape the fact of change or evade the duty of selective accumulation. Unfortunately change and accumulation work in both directions: energies may be dissipated, institutions may decay, and societies may pile up evils and burdens as well as goods and benefits. To assume that a later point in development necessarily brings a higher kind of society is merely to confuse the neutral quality of complexity or maturity with improvement. To assume that a later point in time necessarily carries a greater accumulation of values is to forget the recurrent facts of barbarism and degradation.
Unlike the organic patterns of movement through space and time, the cycle of growth and decay, the balanced motion of the dancer, the statement and return of the musical composition, progress was motion toward infinity, motion without completion or end, motion for motion's sake. One could not have too much progress; it could not come too rapidly; it could not spread too widely; and it could not destroy the ‘unprogressive’ elements in society too swiftly and ruthlessly: for progress was a good in itself independent of direction or end. In the name of progress, the limited but balanced economy of the Hindu village, with its local potter, its local spinners and weavers, its local smith, was overthrown for the sake of providing a market for the potteries of the Five Towns and the textiles of Manchester and the superfluous hardware of Birmingham. The result was impoverished villages in India, hideous and destitute towns in England, and a great wastage in tonnage and manpower in plying the oceans between: but at all events a victory for progress.
Life was judged by the extent to which it ministered to progress, progress was not judged by the extent to which it ministered to life. The last possibility would have been fatal to admit: it would have transported the problem from the cosmic plane to a human one. What paleotect dared ask himself whether labor-saving, money- grubbing, power-acquiring, space-annihilating, thing-producing devices were in fact producing an equivalent expansion and enrichment of life? That question would have been the ultimate heresy. The men who asked it, the Ruskins, the Nietzsches, the Melvilles, were in fact treated as heretics and cast out of this society: in more than one case, they were condemned to an exacerbating solitude that reached the limit of madness.
Other civilizations with a smaller output of power and a larger expenditure of time had equalled and possibly surpassed the paleotechnic period in real efficiency.
What did they seek? A few simple things not to be found between the railroad terminal and the factory: plain animal self-respect, color in the outer environment and emotional depth in the inner landscape, a life lived for its own values, instead of a life on the make.
[The alternative] can have no other end than an impotent victory: the extinction of both sides together, or the suicide of the successful nation at the very moment that it has finished slaughtering its victim.”
(Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization, 1934, IV. 9, p.184-211)
Yes. Scientism is now the dominant mythology of western civilization. It's a bankrupt worldview that eliminates any hope of genuine transcendence. But a society that turns away from a spiritual path of light - the very existence of such light even being denied and ridiculed - is one which by definition has turned to darkness. In this culture, Death and the Void of Eternal Oblivion are the sole ultimate reality. All is without purpose or meaning beyond that which can be grasped for transient gratification by soul-sick, isolated egos.
Like the Aztecs of old, Death assumes the form of a fearsome deity: an obsessive object of fascination and fear, a voracious monster gorging on conscious beings, a terrible god to be worshipped, appeased and vicariously kept at arms length via a constant stream of graphic depictions of violence, apocalyptic chaos and annihilation.
You can see it only in flashes or small intuitions, because the entire world that surrounds us and fills us on the inside has been put together with the explicit intention of making you point in the opposite direction. But still brief and precious as they are, they will never leave you. They are real in a way nothing else is.
Ruskin and Mumford characterised raw materialism and their purveyors as the production of “illth”. Waste not your time, they will never be able to either extract or see Delight from it. Let’s give them an example instead, this they can understand.
Take for instance: “they didn’t have a written history”, which is an immediate absurdity, and of course false, causing among other things a physical effect. Correct statement: “they didn’t need a written history (i.e. they were Such)”, still false obviously, but shedding a bit of light on something relevant. Something we cannot see, even less understand, but it helps one get free of its shackles, and that’s the entire point. A standpoint is not an ideology nor a worldview, it’s a centre. From there all sorts of different worlds spin up, a different way to approach realty in its entirety. And this is from just one single sentence. The biggest lie of our era is “Everything is the same, there are no standpoints”, no, nothing is the same; different, incommensurable universes lie behind each and every possibility, behind every act. History is not so much the world of being as the world of what could have been. Every act of history is in its essence accidental. The further you go back in time, the further history develops, the more you advance the more it contracts. (The symbolic is just an attempt at the realisation of history in time, it is a way to capture its force un-mediated, in the act proper.)
Everything existed so we could exist. We, who are the absolute negation to Them. Modern corollary: We don’t exist.
We deny them being in order ourselves to be. This world exalts the major, is unaware of the minor, and obviously heads to the conclusion.
Thank you as always.
“Value, in the doctrine of progress, was reduced to a time-calculation: value was in fact movement in time. To be old-fashioned or to be ‘out of date’ was to lack value. Progress was the equivalent in history of mechanical motion through space: it was after beholding a thundering railroad train that Tennyson exclaimed, with exquisite aptness, ‘Let the great world spin forever down the ringing grooves of change.’ The machine was displacing every other source of value partly because the machine was by its nature the most progressive element in the new economy.
What remained valid in the notion of progress were two things that had no essential connection with human improvement. First: the fact of life, with its birth, development, renewal, decay, which one might generalize, in such a fashion as to include the whole universe, as the fact of change, motion, transformation of energy. [See yours and The Mother statement] Second: the social fact of accumulation: that is the tendency to augment and conserve those parts of the social heritage which lend themselves to transmission through time. [See SJ Gould on biological change]. No society can escape the fact of change or evade the duty of selective accumulation. Unfortunately change and accumulation work in both directions: energies may be dissipated, institutions may decay, and societies may pile up evils and burdens as well as goods and benefits. To assume that a later point in development necessarily brings a higher kind of society is merely to confuse the neutral quality of complexity or maturity with improvement. To assume that a later point in time necessarily carries a greater accumulation of values is to forget the recurrent facts of barbarism and degradation.
Unlike the organic patterns of movement through space and time, the cycle of growth and decay, the balanced motion of the dancer, the statement and return of the musical composition, progress was motion toward infinity, motion without completion or end, motion for motion's sake. One could not have too much progress; it could not come too rapidly; it could not spread too widely; and it could not destroy the ‘unprogressive’ elements in society too swiftly and ruthlessly: for progress was a good in itself independent of direction or end. In the name of progress, the limited but balanced economy of the Hindu village, with its local potter, its local spinners and weavers, its local smith, was overthrown for the sake of providing a market for the potteries of the Five Towns and the textiles of Manchester and the superfluous hardware of Birmingham. The result was impoverished villages in India, hideous and destitute towns in England, and a great wastage in tonnage and manpower in plying the oceans between: but at all events a victory for progress.
Life was judged by the extent to which it ministered to progress, progress was not judged by the extent to which it ministered to life. The last possibility would have been fatal to admit: it would have transported the problem from the cosmic plane to a human one. What paleotect dared ask himself whether labor-saving, money- grubbing, power-acquiring, space-annihilating, thing-producing devices were in fact producing an equivalent expansion and enrichment of life? That question would have been the ultimate heresy. The men who asked it, the Ruskins, the Nietzsches, the Melvilles, were in fact treated as heretics and cast out of this society: in more than one case, they were condemned to an exacerbating solitude that reached the limit of madness.
Other civilizations with a smaller output of power and a larger expenditure of time had equalled and possibly surpassed the paleotechnic period in real efficiency.
What did they seek? A few simple things not to be found between the railroad terminal and the factory: plain animal self-respect, color in the outer environment and emotional depth in the inner landscape, a life lived for its own values, instead of a life on the make.
[The alternative] can have no other end than an impotent victory: the extinction of both sides together, or the suicide of the successful nation at the very moment that it has finished slaughtering its victim.”
(Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization, 1934, IV. 9, p.184-211)
Yes. Scientism is now the dominant mythology of western civilization. It's a bankrupt worldview that eliminates any hope of genuine transcendence. But a society that turns away from a spiritual path of light - the very existence of such light even being denied and ridiculed - is one which by definition has turned to darkness. In this culture, Death and the Void of Eternal Oblivion are the sole ultimate reality. All is without purpose or meaning beyond that which can be grasped for transient gratification by soul-sick, isolated egos.
Like the Aztecs of old, Death assumes the form of a fearsome deity: an obsessive object of fascination and fear, a voracious monster gorging on conscious beings, a terrible god to be worshipped, appeased and vicariously kept at arms length via a constant stream of graphic depictions of violence, apocalyptic chaos and annihilation.