Definitions
In the end, it’s all comes down to harsh realism.
Socialists imagine there are no wolves, so democracy is easy.
Conservatives imagine democracy as a way for wolves to apologize.
Libertarians imagine democracy as two wolves and a sheep deciding on the main course for dinner.
Neoreactionaries see democracy as two sheep and a wolf deciding on the merits of mandatory vegetarianism.
ADDED: Survivingbabel anticipates (6 months ago, no link available):
Democracy is closer to two sheep and a wolf voting on what’s for dinner. The sheep unite in collective action to fight off the wolf. The wolf, stripped of its natural power, must graze alongside the sheep. Eventually it dies from malnutrition, and the sheep, having lost their natural predator, soon overpopulate and overgraze their land. Then they die too, usually replaced by another species entirely.
Neoreactionaries see democracy as two sheep and a wolf deciding on the merits of mandatory vegetarianism/
I’ve made the precise same analogy before, so I am happy to see its overall applicability. What, after all, would two wolves need democracy for?
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admin Reply:
May 14th, 2013 at 10:01 pm
If you pass on (or link to) your earlier version, I’ll throw you a lamb chop, or at least a ‘footnote’ (ADDED).
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survivingbabel Reply:
May 14th, 2013 at 11:58 pm
I posted this to reddit 6 months ago (no link, from my dormant IRL account):
“Democracy is closer to two sheep and a wolf voting on what’s for dinner. The sheep unite in collective action to fight off the wolf. The wolf, stripped of its natural power, must graze alongside the sheep. Eventually it dies from malnutrition, and the sheep, having lost their natural predator, soon overpopulate and overgraze their land. Then they die too, usually replaced by another species entirely.”
Clumsy, but there it is.
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northanger Reply:
May 15th, 2013 at 12:22 am
typing out something else from “The Projection of Britain: British Overseas Publicity and Propaganda, 1919-1939″ & just saw this…
‘God would not have made them sheep had he not wanted them to be sheared.’ (A line spoken by the actor Eli Wallach in John Sturge’s 1961 film The Magnificent Seven)
spandrell Reply:
May 15th, 2013 at 5:17 am
It’s hard to make a metaphor this accurate.
Rachel Haywire Reply:
May 15th, 2013 at 10:15 am
It is only through glorifying the sheep that democracy is able to prosper. This is why mandatory vegetarianism is considered important.
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admin Reply:
May 15th, 2013 at 10:49 am
A religious test for you: Try to meditate on the Lamb of God without immediately thinking of mint sauce.
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Rachel Haywire Reply:
May 15th, 2013 at 11:04 am
Blasphemy! The mint sauce has nothing to do with said Lamb.
pigs…
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Artxell Knaphni Reply:
May 20th, 2013 at 7:48 pm
Nice piggy!
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@Northanger
Does this beat my Bangles post? (I’m still on a slushie break).
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northanger Reply:
May 14th, 2013 at 8:24 pm
we had grape slushies sunday last.
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In the end, it all comes down to facile analogies…
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admin Reply:
May 15th, 2013 at 12:42 am
Everyone is slaved to their own facile analogies, until they recognize the fact, and begin to process them out.
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that definition of Democracy could map, so to say, to a Pythagorean diatonic semitone (leimma) with a ratio of 243:256. Plutarch: 243 represents Lucifer; (243×3)=729 represents Sun: O Sun, to tell thee how I hate thy beams that bring to my remembrance from what state I fell (PL IV:37-39)
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Posted on May 15th, 2013 at 1:52 am | Quote@David
Too true, too true. The question (or trap) might be then enslavement to a new set if facile analogies following perceived liberation from the previous set (enter deconstruction as facile analogy?).
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Posted on May 15th, 2013 at 2:31 am | QuoteNeoreactionaries are a new species?
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admin Reply:
May 15th, 2013 at 10:13 am
Soon.
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Rachel Haywire Reply:
May 15th, 2013 at 10:22 am
Time to design a new race, quite literally. In the future we will be laughing at the how simplistic Hitler’s “perfect breed” was, compared to this new level of perfection.
Building an alternative to the Catherdral we could create the Castle. Of course this could turn us into ideological slaves. Yet we would have a warring structure to fight against the forces of the Cathedral, which could draw the line and begin the conquest.
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admin Reply:
May 15th, 2013 at 10:54 am
Godwining yourself in the second sentence — that’s hardcore.
Hitler did not see the potentials that we do now. He will not be relevant. Anything to be hardcore though.
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Posted on May 15th, 2013 at 11:00 am | QuoteNigel Kneale as Dark Enlightenment prophet?
http://k-punk.abstractdynamics.org/archives/000818.html
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northanger Reply:
May 17th, 2013 at 1:32 am
I am experiencing nIb’poH. The feeling I have done this before. –Worf, TNG: “Cause and Effect”
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Artxell Knaphni Reply:
May 17th, 2013 at 8:02 pm
“Alex Says:
Nigel Kneale as Dark Enlightenment prophet?
http://k-punk.abstractdynamics.org/archives/000818.html”
Alex, thank you for that.
This kind of speculation was very natural to me as a child, was more conceptually extreme, though. That complex of ideas would constitute a perspective from which to begin speculation, and the formation of new perspectives.
“Or is it a question not of miniaturization at all but of tuning the stimuli?”
This was particularly interesting. I wrote a novella in 1988, and spoke of a kind of existential ‘tuning’, there.
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Alex Reply:
May 18th, 2013 at 8:32 pm
Those of us who have the great misfortune to be confirmed theonomists generally find the paranoiac mode the most entertaining:
“science since the enlightenment has maintained there is no supplementary spiritual substance”
“but the material world in which we live is more profoundly alien and strange than we have ever imagined”
“an enquiry into the nature of what the world is like is also inevitably an unravelling of what we are”
“Something else, something more ancient, stirs beneath”
“some unimaginably ancient place of sacrifice “
“solicits the scientists into precipitating yet another death”
“The Stone Tape” shows this process being deliberately set in motion: it is implied that the research team’s unseen employer was manipulated by or allied with the entity in the stone from the beginning.
The pre/posthuman which is necessarily implacably antihuman — the outside that breaks in or inside that breaks out — is in Kneale’s work variously depicted as extraterrestrial, megalithic, goetic, mechanical or bestial. (A scientist conducting experiments in lycanthropy speculates on man’s evolutionary descent from wolves …)
Attempts to enact this ‘harsh reality’ evoke the classic distinction between the opposite of a revolution and a revolution ‘in the opposite direction’. Is it conceivable that our host is aligned, wittingly or unwittingly, with hostile trans-dimensional mantids??
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fotrkd Reply:
May 18th, 2013 at 9:09 pm
I believe he prefers the term “poly-tendrilled monstrosities”.
Nick B. Steves Reply:
May 18th, 2013 at 9:35 pm
Just keep your damn poly-tendrilled monstrosities off my lawn!
Alex Reply:
May 18th, 2013 at 10:08 pm
Yes of course. It was spoken of in hushed tones in 1970s playgrounds.
fotrkd Reply:
May 18th, 2013 at 10:14 pm
I think you’re confusing them with the child catcher…
admin Reply:
May 18th, 2013 at 10:53 pm
Surely “hostile trans-dimensional mantids” of such superiority and subtlety would find it equally effortless to disguise themselves behind the mask of a “confirmed theonomist”?
Alex Reply:
May 18th, 2013 at 11:16 pm
He was one of the good guys.
Alex Reply:
May 18th, 2013 at 11:17 pm
Mais bien sûr.
Artxell Knaphni Reply:
May 20th, 2013 at 8:28 pm
I missed your coment before, Alex.
It’s good, too.
You do tend to focus on the harsh bits.
Don’t really like the horrific.
It’s a shame ‘niceness’ is so unfashionable.
” Is it conceivable that our host is aligned, wittingly or unwittingly, with hostile trans-dimensional mantids??”
We can get the weltan-shrikes on to it.
Alex Reply:
May 20th, 2013 at 11:32 pm
Artxell Knaphni:
Well they started it. XD
BOO!
But seriously folks … it’s interesting that the cultural decline of Christianity has not seen a corresponding decline in popular fascination with the demonically monstrous. One might have expected such bogies would melt away like snow before the blazing sun of the Enlightenment, yet — I believe to Professor Dawkins’ considerable chagrin — modern Western adolescents are probably exposed via film, TV, magazines, video games, the internet etc to more and more viscerally intense representations of praeternatural evil than any medieval peasant. All that has happened is that these representations float free of the old restraining cultural tropes. Once upon a time, Dracula wilted before the Crucifix or consecrated Host. Now, as a character in Blade put it, “crosses don’t do squat”.
refrigescet caritas multorum
Nice, simple example for people like me.
Have just woken up, so in caveman mode.
Two wolves, one sheep?
Numbers don’t matter so much. They do, but we can put the variations that they generate to one side, in these considerations.
“Socialists imagine there are no wolves, so democracy is easy.”
Every wolf must look for their ‘inner wimp’?
All wolves get fed up and tired, not a hard policy to implement.
“Conservatives imagine democracy as a way for wolves to apologize.”
No, conservatives are the wolves, and the sheep, who are scared of changes working against them. They’re quite happy if changes work against others.
“Libertarians imagine democracy as two wolves and a sheep deciding on the main course for dinner.”
Libertarians are “You’re all wolves now! You have weapons!”
America was taken by force of weapons technology. So the individual internalises that foundation, becoming a nation unto itself. It has been said that the world is a “global
anarchy of nation states” Here is that world where every individual engages in International Relations with her/his neighbour. Everything is a contract.
“Don’t tell me what to do. What’s mine is mine.”
“If you feel like working hard today, just step on my shoes and take my pay” ZZ Top
“Neoreactionaries see democracy as two sheep and a wolf deciding on the merits of mandatory vegetarianism.”
As I said before, “The Weakest Link” always votes the strongest off.
What’s a couple of wolves going to do about a bear? About an elephant? About a fly?
In the dramatics of global vitality, is it worth arguing over the roles of the moment, when you can see the possibilities of an entire aeon?
Getting back to your example, if the wolves eat the sheep, do they starve afterwards?
People talk about ‘Nature’, as if it’s some divine injunction from an Occidental, Abrahamanic religion, when all they have is choices and consequences that they can experience and observe.
But people are lazy, they don’t want to think. They find some arrangement, that they like results of, and fetishise it, turning it into a commodity production. Then the game is to get everyone into it and establish, embody, a corporation. To get everyone addicted, its best to devalue and diminish anything that hasn’t come on board, a la Christian doctrine of ‘Original Sin’, etc.. The implementation of ‘needs’ which can only be satisfied by the corporate network.
The production of acolytic robots in Northern countries was accomplished through the Calvinistic harshness meted out to those who did not obey the instructions of a ‘work ethic’ that produced strong and verifiable material effects. Dispensing with their principle of divine sanction, because it did not seem to produce these effects according to established requests (prayers) for commodities, the acolytic robots took on the task themselves. Under the pressure of such divine obligation, under the burden of having to conform to the demands of producing discrete, strong, and effective commodities, their collective efforts were characterised by a tension and ill humour that periodically required release.
Trapped in this complex of institutionally inadequate selves still requiring the justification of an absent divinity: the redemptive heroics of arduous commodity production: an insatiable religious avarice that seeks God through producing His Effects: and the arbitrary wrath of this capricious God when His Demands and Tasks (commodities) are not met: the acolytic robots were no longer able to understand anything beyond the language of their harsh productive rhythm.
No longer able to see the ‘apple’ they had bitten into, or anything else, their thought could only follow the sample-logic of the mouthful, their actions spoke only the language of bites (bytes?)
They’re building or have already built a superdiary in the Midlands where cows will never see grass.
The desire for meat, structures a whole world into being a factory, has it ossified meat-eaters into being particular kinds of ‘consumers’ – ‘consumer’ functions?
Is it ‘natural’ to eat meat?
After all ‘humans’ are ‘omnivores’.
Is it ‘natural’ to fly if you don’t have wings?
Is it ‘natural’ to build aeroplanes?
Isn’t it easy enough, these days, to grow artificial meat in vats?
Would that be ‘natural’?
The ‘natural’ doesn’t tell you what to do, and neither, really, is it a justification for anything. There are only choices and the worlds they can bring forth. What worlds do you want?
I do eat meat, but I’m aware of that.
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Posted on May 18th, 2013 at 12:10 pm | Quote“The ‘natural’ doesn’t tell you what to do, and neither, really, is it a justification for anything.” — The first part of this sentence is clearly right, the second part is more controversial. Nature punishes (and eradicates) error, and there’s no higher tribunal to appeal to if you don’t like the way error is being defined. Is survival ‘justification’? If it isn’t, justification isn’t worth much in any currency that nature accepts.
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Alex Reply:
May 19th, 2013 at 12:19 pm
And yet —
“I love to see, when leaves depart,
The clear anatomy arrive,
Winter, the paragon of art,
That kills all forms of life and feeling
Save what is pure and will survive. …”
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admin Reply:
May 19th, 2013 at 12:35 pm
An ingenious but minutely glitched reading, because it isn’t survival that discriminates between Johnson and Milton, but civilization (and “its survival”, which Johnson serves, and Milton justifies). Much survives through Milton that civilization can only shudder at.
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Alex Reply:
May 19th, 2013 at 3:25 pm
All the same, a Milton — or at any rate a Paradise Lost — can only exist within the matrix of a highly developed civilisation. To say Milton justifies civilisation is to acknowledge that he requires it, which means he requires Johnson and, by extension, all the numberless souls who labour to support Johnson. They are the muck from which the lotus of genius rises!
But what is any of that to nature? Can a tribunal that makes no distinction between Palestrina and the drumbeats of savages really be the highest court of appeal?
admin Reply:
May 19th, 2013 at 3:37 pm
@ Alex
There’s nothing at all in your latest comment that I would be tortured by — in the slightest — were I to agree with it unreservedly. Most problematic, from my perspective, is this:
“Can a tribunal that makes no distinction between Palestrina and the drumbeats of savages really be the highest court of appeal?”
— but that is only because I think you do nature a profound ‘injustice’. The drumbeat of savages is fading, despite everything that romanticizes on its behalf, because nature sets exacting standards of competence. We should at least be cautious before leaping to conclusions about what the ‘tribunal of nature’ demands.
Alex Reply:
May 19th, 2013 at 5:37 pm
I jolly well hope so.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dk6wr7cKAjY
“We sit by and watch the Barbarian, we tolerate him; in the long stretches of peace we are not afraid. We are tickled by his irreverence, his comic inversion of our old certitudes and our fixed creeds refreshes us; we laugh. But as we laugh we are watched by large and awful faces from beyond: and on these faces there is no smile.”
– Belloc, “Survivals and New Arrivals”.
Sticking with beast fables:
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Thales Reply:
May 18th, 2013 at 2:33 pm
I love those old animated cartoons. Vintage goodness.
Apropos:
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wM1DgihKHVI?rel=0&w=420&h=315
This one always disturbed me because it instructs the grasshopper to carpe diem in the spring and then manufacture sentiment and macroeconomic arguments for “aggregate demand” in winter. Repeat every year because the ant is a sucker, and a sucker never learns.
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Nick B. Steves Reply:
May 18th, 2013 at 8:00 pm
Wow. The Cathedral Propaganda has sure gone down hill.
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“there’s no higher tribunal to appeal to if you don’t like the way error is being defined.”
Hence the appeal of Democracy — do what you like then vote on the consequences.
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admin Reply:
May 18th, 2013 at 1:55 pm
The Puritan (radical deontological) conclusion: if we do what feels right, it will be justified by a higher power. Hoppe’s title The God that Failed captures the syndrome and outcome well.
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vimothy Reply:
May 18th, 2013 at 2:09 pm
Hence the appeal of Democracy — do what you like then vote on the consequences.
Excellent formulation.
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The wolves: Let us prey on the sheep. That is the natural order.
The foolish sheep: The wolves frighten us. If we shut our eyes we will not see them. Maybe they will go away.
The cunning (but no less foolish) sheep: Let us trick the wolves into believing they are sheep. Then we will be safe.
The shepherd: I would not have my flock be a prey to wolves. Yet wolves cannot act otherwise than in accordance with their nature. Therefore let us breed wolfhounds.
What happens next is the sheep accuse the shepherd of harassing them with his wolfhounds, while the wolfhounds accuse the shepherd of planning to turn them into sheep.
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admin Reply:
May 18th, 2013 at 10:57 pm
That is really good.
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fotrkd Reply:
May 18th, 2013 at 11:18 pm
Can I stick up for sheep in a completely literal and irrelevant way? A couple of rams would destroy a lone wolf. Wolves rely on their pack just as sheep use the flock. Flocks don’t run solely through fear but intelligence (so fear as a useful instinct). Some primitive breeds for that very reason flock and then fragment.
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northanger Reply:
May 18th, 2013 at 11:41 pm
Battle at Kruger
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lions eat sushi. sharks don’t eat nemo. and a really long infographic
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Posted on May 18th, 2013 at 11:06 pm | Quote‘Paradise Lost’ Gets Axed By Legendary Pictures [directed by Alex Proyas, who directed “The Crow”, which was going to star Bradley Cooper who dropped out of “The Crow” remake]
also came across comment saying Milton never calls Satan “Lucifer” in PL.
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fotrkd Reply:
May 18th, 2013 at 11:45 pm
My non-Miltonic understanding was that Lucifer as the morning star was Satan’s name pre-fall. But you’ve wrecked me on the Milton thread (currently recharging).
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northanger Reply:
May 19th, 2013 at 12:07 am
have another grape slushie.
[highest AQ match (Crowley/James Bond & I Ching blah blah)] Human Gene ID: 22872, SEC31 homolog A (S. cerevisiae) (instrumental to winemaking, baking and brewing)
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fotrkd Reply:
May 19th, 2013 at 7:57 am
Are you heading back to leaven? “Yeast is estimated to share at least 31% of its genome with that of humans”:
The church is to be like unleavened bread, Leaven can do several things, the most obvious–it puffs up; it represents pride, it does the opposite of what the gospel does which humbles man and makes us God-reliant.
Old Christian (gnostic) trichotomy of body, soul and spirit – the spirit is uncreated, and also the creative aspect in man.. Which needs to be fully woken up?
fotrkd Reply:
May 19th, 2013 at 8:30 am
LIFE
northanger Reply:
May 19th, 2013 at 9:22 am
Are you heading back to leaven?
that link posits leaven as negative corrupting influence — there are other interpretations. (Yahweh’s presence and the knowledge of his unassailable might are to give… confidence even if [you] seem like grasshoppers in [your] own eyes). Genesis 30:25-31:16, speckled & spotted sheep; John 17, the vine and the branches; Matthew 25, the sheep and the goats… the mustard seed, the tares &c &c
btw, Satan’s former or true name was unknown, and the name “Lucifer” belongs to the Messiah.
fotrkd Reply:
May 19th, 2013 at 9:41 am
Right.. I was tying it to Satan’s pride in PL.
How is it you do not understand that I did not speak to you concerning bread?—but to beware of the leaven of the Pharisees and Sadducees.” Then they understood that He did not tell them to beware of the leaven of bread, but of the doctrine of the Pharisees and Sadducee (Matt 16:11-12)
northanger Reply:
May 19th, 2013 at 10:47 am
http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/swinburne/simmons12.html
One can even infer that this stance on intellectual androgyny transfers to an ideology that revolves around the idea of the “perfect spiritual hermaphrodite,” as Swinburne “imagined a primordial sexlessness in man” (Landow), an imagination similar to the Coleridgean idea that “all opposition is a tendency to re-union.”
– – –
This larger harmony must originate, however, in the harmony and union of the two lovers, their transformation into the perfect spiritual hermaphrodite: “Twain halves of a perfect heart,” exempt from time: “made fast / Soul to soul while the years fell past” (II. 45-46). Soul and body interpenetrate: “All senses mixed in the spirit’s cup / Till flesh and spirit are molten in sunder” (I. 46) —Robert A. Greenberg, Gosse’s “Swinburne,” “The Triumph Of Time” and the Context of “Les Noyades”
northanger Reply:
May 19th, 2013 at 11:00 am
[Kwang] Jeon’s perspective on the plague that wiped out his amoebae was radically different from what might have been expected of a conventional microbiologist. Examining the lethal epidemic, he discovered that not all of the infected amoebae died. The precious few that survived did so even though their cytoplasm carried tens of thousands of living X-bacteria. It was clear that these few amoebae differed from all the others, possessing some inherited resistance to the plague bacillus. Intrigued, Jeon put aside his populations of uninfected amoebae, making sure they were protected from contamination, and began a new line of experiments, studying the interaction between the infected amoeba and the X-bacterium. Frank Ryan, Darwin’s Blind Spot: Evolution Beyond Natural Selection
when two become one
http://evolution.berkeley.edu/evolibrary/article/endosymbiosis_01
@Alex
“Well they started it. XD”
lol. Who started what is no easy task to discern, Alex. New perspectives are required, from which new understandings can ensue. They might even be very old understandings that are forgotten.
“BOO!
But seriously folks … it’s interesting that the cultural decline of Christianity has not seen a corresponding decline in popular fascination with the demonically monstrous. One might have expected such bogies would melt away like snow before the blazing sun of the Enlightenment, yet — I believe to Professor Dawkins’ considerable chagrin — modern Western adolescents are probably exposed via film, TV, magazines, video games, the internet etc to more and more viscerally intense representations of praeternatural evil than any medieval peasant. All that has happened is that these representations float free of the old restraining cultural tropes. Once upon a time, Dracula wilted before the Crucifix or consecrated Host. Now, as a character in Blade put it, “crosses don’t do squat”.”
Yes, you’re absolutely right! It’s something I’ve noticed playing out for a while now. Might have to do a post on this. Demon production is definitely on the increase. It’s part of a larger movement that is going on: the West is in panic. It’s a panic formation, are you guys falling into that trap?
Both your visual examples of “praeternatural evil” could be metaphors of the social (society), especially for those who are its victims. A tentacular totalitarianism bereft of any ideological ordering other than its own insatiable appetites.
“refrigescet caritas multorum”
Had to look this up.
Alex, it’s a difficult time. Perhaps the coldness is the numbness of despair? And there can be a coolness wherein ‘love’ contemplates the carnage, the kaliyuga, and prepares to steer a different course?
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Alex Reply:
May 23rd, 2013 at 12:02 am
Artxell Knaphni:
Indeed, and conversely it may be that old perspectives yield new understandings.
The West certainly is in a panic, isn’t it? When gripped by panic one temptation is to put a bag over one’s head. Case in point: Dr Carolyn Porco, director of something called CICLOPS, which sounds like a sinister politico-criminal organisation but in reality is just a NASA-connected science group. Dr Porco seems a genuinely nice little piggy and swaddles herself in her shiny foil space blanket for comfort. (“To love nature and to fear it and to rely on it …” – The Wicker Man)
An alternative strategy is to try to save one’s skin by swearing fealty to the big bad wolf, whether it be middle-class liberals adopting the argot of violent urban underclasses or philosopher-artists bending the knee to receive the wolf’s pelt and transforming unguent from the Lord of the Forest. (“… and to appease it where necessary.”)
Alas, this type of magical thinking ultimately proves no more efficacious: “For you have said: We have entered into a league with death, and we have made a covenant with hell. When the overflowing scourge shall pass through, it shall not come upon us: for we have placed our hope in lies, and by falsehood we are protected. … And hail shall overturn the hope of falsehood: and waters shall overflow its protection. And your league with death shall be abolished, and your covenant with hell shall not stand: when the overflowing scourge shall pass, you shall be trodden down by it.” (Isaias 28:15-18)
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Alex Reply:
May 23rd, 2013 at 12:03 am
“Then every thing includes itself in power,/Power into will, will into appetite;/And appetite, an universal wolf,/So doubly seconded with will and power,/Must make perforce an universal prey,/And last eat up himself.”
But … only a metaphor? Sheesh. You take all the fun out of life!
There’s certainly a lot of it about. L’Chaim!
For sure. Keep calm and don’t lose your head.
Regards.
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