thanks for asking "what is the plan?". today, i am not sanguine about the near future, and maybe more ....
My friend Douglass Carmichael wrote in his recent book Gardenworld about the loss of religion and tradition as providing some authoritative truth about the world (Max Weber was onto this as well). And this excerpt here, for me, seems to shed some light on what we are living through:
“The even deeper story of the loss of Christianity in Europe leading to loss of belief in a humane and meaningful society. Interesting and important questions, such as can a society cohere without a shared belief system, have not been engaged. Instead, we are left with the mathematics of supply and demand.”
— Gardenworld Politics: The hope and the issues: Responding to climate collapse by Douglass Carmichael https://a.co/3MdmdHb
I confess I don't buy the argument. I feel like we have a failure of leadership, more like Lasch's Revolt of the Elites:
> The thinking classes are fatally removed from the physical side of life… Their only relation to productive labor is that of consumers. They have no experience of making anything substantial or enduring. They live in a world of abstractions and images, a simulated world that consists of computerized models of reality – “hyperreality,” as it’s been called – as distinguished from the palatable, immediate, physical reality inhabited by ordinary men and women. Their belief in “social construction of reality” – the central dogma of postmodernist thought – reflects the experience of living in an artificial environment from which everything that resists human control (unavoidably, everything familiar and reassuring as well) has been rigorously excluded. Control has become their obsession. In their drive to insulate themselves against risk and contingency – against the unpredictable hazards that afflict human life – the thinking classes have seceded not just from the common world around them but from reality itself. | Christopher Lasch, *The Revolt of the Elites*
I like the excerpt from Lasch. And your feeling about leadership. My current reading and thinking about the loss of the authority of religion and tradition led me to this Christopher Lasch 1992 essay: Gnosticism, Ancient and Modern: The Religion of the Future? (citation below) (would love to talk more about these notions):
Page 40:
> If the gnostic impulse finds expression in our time -- in the scientific dream of solving the mysteries of the universe, in New Age spirituality, more generally in a mood of extremity and existential nostalgia -- it is because we too, like so many who lived in the fading glow of the Hellenistic civilization, have lost confidence in the world around us. ...
> Civic life is swallowed up by the market; buying and selling become the only activities we have in common. ...
> Gnosticism, the faith of the faithless, suits the twentieth century as well as it suited the second, and it may turn out to suit the next century better still. Its greatest opportunity, perhaps, still lies ahead. We can expect many people, still only dimly aware of its undeniable attractions, to fall on it as a religion seemingly made to order for the hard times ahead.
-----
Lasch, C. (1992). Gnosticism, ancient and modern: The religion of the future? Salmagundi, (96), 27-42. Skidmore College.
thanks for asking "what is the plan?". today, i am not sanguine about the near future, and maybe more ....
My friend Douglass Carmichael wrote in his recent book Gardenworld about the loss of religion and tradition as providing some authoritative truth about the world (Max Weber was onto this as well). And this excerpt here, for me, seems to shed some light on what we are living through:
“The even deeper story of the loss of Christianity in Europe leading to loss of belief in a humane and meaningful society. Interesting and important questions, such as can a society cohere without a shared belief system, have not been engaged. Instead, we are left with the mathematics of supply and demand.”
— Gardenworld Politics: The hope and the issues: Responding to climate collapse by Douglass Carmichael https://a.co/3MdmdHb
I confess I don't buy the argument. I feel like we have a failure of leadership, more like Lasch's Revolt of the Elites:
> The thinking classes are fatally removed from the physical side of life… Their only relation to productive labor is that of consumers. They have no experience of making anything substantial or enduring. They live in a world of abstractions and images, a simulated world that consists of computerized models of reality – “hyperreality,” as it’s been called – as distinguished from the palatable, immediate, physical reality inhabited by ordinary men and women. Their belief in “social construction of reality” – the central dogma of postmodernist thought – reflects the experience of living in an artificial environment from which everything that resists human control (unavoidably, everything familiar and reassuring as well) has been rigorously excluded. Control has become their obsession. In their drive to insulate themselves against risk and contingency – against the unpredictable hazards that afflict human life – the thinking classes have seceded not just from the common world around them but from reality itself. | Christopher Lasch, *The Revolt of the Elites*
I like the excerpt from Lasch. And your feeling about leadership. My current reading and thinking about the loss of the authority of religion and tradition led me to this Christopher Lasch 1992 essay: Gnosticism, Ancient and Modern: The Religion of the Future? (citation below) (would love to talk more about these notions):
Page 40:
> If the gnostic impulse finds expression in our time -- in the scientific dream of solving the mysteries of the universe, in New Age spirituality, more generally in a mood of extremity and existential nostalgia -- it is because we too, like so many who lived in the fading glow of the Hellenistic civilization, have lost confidence in the world around us. ...
> Civic life is swallowed up by the market; buying and selling become the only activities we have in common. ...
> Gnosticism, the faith of the faithless, suits the twentieth century as well as it suited the second, and it may turn out to suit the next century better still. Its greatest opportunity, perhaps, still lies ahead. We can expect many people, still only dimly aware of its undeniable attractions, to fall on it as a religion seemingly made to order for the hard times ahead.
-----
Lasch, C. (1992). Gnosticism, ancient and modern: The religion of the future? Salmagundi, (96), 27-42. Skidmore College.
Link: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40548388