Eight vices were forbidden in the early mosaic code, which wisely watered them down to where they permitted society to survive. How much lying is permitted? All but false witness against actual neighbours. How much killing?
The evidence for the success of the judao-christian codes includes eight thousand years of cultural survival, and counting.
The enlightenment brought new freedoms for those who could afford them. Including the freedom of Gibbon to explore the rapid corruption of every Christian state.
The late nineteenth century realisation that science is not intuitive mechanisms – relativity and quantum theory knocked that one – brought in the vultures of unreason. Warhol and Jackson and Hollywood epitomize for me the lost twentieth century of reason. There is the underlying suspicion that the doctrines of nihilism and agnosticism, fascism and dada would not have spread without commercial pushes: there was money to be made in using them or countering them. Similarly grantology and well-funded drug research today corral the best brains.
Perhaps the only virtue is the understanding that leads to deeper understanding. A problem with this is insanity: remove the props of childhood, and most adults wobble. This limits deep thinking to those who are both outside the canon of their society, and either very private or very unpublished. Any support group dilutes by spin the message of the prophet. The mafia of the capitalist convergency would not have its foundations rattled. Spies are the best paid of all soldiers.
Newton and Darwin waited decades before publishing their pivotal theories, for good reasons. Electronic publishing achieves the same effect by a different route. The meat is lost in the mist. But there is a difference: resonance used by the search engines tells intelligent seekers what is happening. The new enlightenment is for those who can escape the cake and circuses. And there are enough of them for their new species to take losses and to thrive. In this war the brown shirts will be pilloried, the Gestapo punished, by their own more moral children. Youtube is hard to refute at breakfast.
And for the masses? For them mental euthanasia, the tat of democracy, and the hypermarket temple. Can we fix this? Prehistoric and historic slavery say no: co-evolution was built on entrapment. Are we big enough to escape this paradigm? Mentally, yes, we know we need to. Capitalism says no, the system depends on it. Spiritually, the arguments for a new system abound. Electronically, we have no choice: surveillance of individual and group mental patterns will revoke the privacy of the cranium. Just as forensic DNA use can place a criminal at the place and soon the time of a crime, so will mobile dynamic brainscans identify pre-crime deviant thoughts by mental body-language.
The race between conservative control and genuine democratic freedom is as ever too close to call. The division of the species looms as never before. To the barricades! But remember that last century Paris replaced all cobblestones with tarmac to remove the weapon of the barricaders. So the republic will have to come from within. Over the discoverers and revealers of spirit.
[ add comment ] ( 2 views ) | [ 0 trackbacks ] | permalink |
( 3 / 227 )
Calendar
