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meredithcook's review
I can't even begin to rate this book because I have no idea what the heck he was talking about the entire time.
rpmiller's review
4.0
Lots of good concepts in this book. It will take some time to digest. More later.
schmidtmark56's review
3.0
Hmm, so that's where modern American conservatism comes from. Too bad the republicans jettisoned cool lil bits like being against war and not sucking up to capitalism. The line which drew me into the book was this:
“For four centuries every man has been not only his own priest but his own professor of ethics, and the consequence is an anarchy which threatens even that minimum consensus of value necessary to the political state.”
which was followed closely by:
“world view is the most important thing about a man”
I wholeheartedly agree, synechdiche and all. The heart of Dick's arguments are that of materialistic modernism winning over premodern traditionalism. In the direct wake of world war II, there was no postmodernism, only shock. Postmodernism came as the necessary aftertaste of such loss, and, as in real aftertastes, it takes a minute for it to hit you. As such, with the dichotomy instead of the now-familiar trichotomy, things seem like false dichotomies simply because we now see a trichotomy. I think it still generally works, as postmodernity is still usually hopelessly materialistic.
Most honest philosophers will admit that absolute materialism is absurd and philosophically untenable. Dick has a fun time poking holes in that:
“His decline can be represented as a long series of abdications. He has found less and less ground for authority at the same time he thought he was setting himself up as the center of authority in the universe; indeed, there seems to exist here a dialectic process which takes away his power in proportion as he demonstrates that his independence entitles him to power.”
For some reason he traces the decline to Nominalism and William of Ockham being kinda skeptical of platonism (ideals and forms and all that stuff). I'd trace it back to, idk, the garden of eden, or maybe babel, or maybe the papacy, or maybe luther. He only mentions babel from the preceeding list. This is a good summary of the results of nominalism, in his eyes:
“Here begins the assault upon definition: if words no longer correspond to objective realities, it seems no great wrong to take liberties with words. From this point on, faith in language as a means of arriving at truth weakens, until our own age, filled with an acute sense of doubt, looks for a remedy in the new science of semantics.”
Weaver puts his finger on a pulse I'd very much like to tap into, but he also throws in lots of garbage about jazz being a harbinger of nihilism (kinda racist prolly) and other partisan defenses of tradition and premodernism that even I, a self-admitted premodernist, wouldn't attempt. Against the then-invincible-looking face of modernity, Dick stands strong:
“The apostles of modernism usually begin their retort with catalogues of modern achievement, not realizing that here they bear witness to their immersion in particulars. We must remind them that we cannot begin to enumerate until we have defined what is to be sought or proved. It will not suffice to point out the inventions and processes of our century unless it can be shown that they are something other than a splendid efflorescence of decay. Whoever desires to praise some modern achievement should wait until he has related it to the professed aims of our civilization as rigorously as the Schoolmen related a corollary to their doctrine of the nature of God. All demonstrations lacking this are pointless.”
&
“The unexpressed assumption of empiricism is that experience will tell us what we are experiencing. In the popular arena one can tell from certain newspaper columns and radio programs that the average man has become imbued with this notion and imagines that an
industrious acquisition of particulars will render him a man of knowledge. With what pathetic trust does he recite his facts! He has been told that knowledge is power, and knowledge consists of a great many small things.”
This is simultaneously a premodern and postmodern critique of modernity, and it's extremely powerful. People nowadays know so much worthless trivia. Sure someone may know how many feet long some river is, but people don't understand what or how to value anymore. This little bit however precludes him from being a postmodernist, as he calls out the problem he had started to see and which would be fully consummated in postmodernity:
”This explains why precultural periods are characterized by formlessness and post-cultural by the clashing of forms. The darkling plain, swept by alarms, which threatens to be the world of our future, is an arena in which conflicting ideas, numerous after the accumulation of centuries, are freed from the discipline earlier imposed by ultimate conceptions. The decline is to confusion; we are agitated by sensation and look with wonder upon the serene somnambulistic creations of souls which had the metaphysical anchorage.”
He also rightfully points out how the modernity of his age was developing into postmodernity with its attack on exclusivity (something modernity didn't mind), and its attack on form per se. He goes on to elucidate something about religion which has been self-evident to me, as religion is much more than the supernatural:
“That it does not matter what a man believes is a statement heard on every side today. The statement carries a fearful implication. If a man is a philosopher in the sense with which we started, what he believes tells him what the world is for. How can men who disagree about what the world is for agree about any of the minutiae of daily conduct? The statement really means that it does not matter what a man believes so long as he does not take his beliefs seriously. Anyone can observe that this is the status to which religious belief has been reduced for many years. But suppose he does take his beliefs seriously? Then what he believes places a stamp upon his experience, and he belongs to a culture, which is a league founded on exclusive principles.”
Many times does Dick devolve into prudishness, but he is right: slippery slopes do exist, and the prudes are always proven right eventually. Consider Logan Paul's infamous forest excursion and read the following:
"The rise of sensational journalism everywhere testifies to man’s loss of points of reference, to his determination to enjoy the forbidden in the name of freedom. All reserve is being sacrificed to titillation."
Dick even echoes my thoughts on education which is too "democratic", or one could say automatic:
“For, if the proscription against every kind of distinction continues, there is no hope of integration except on the level of instinct.”
I've been trying to decide if some of his ideas/stances are just reactionary, if they are just partisan, or if they are actually original and genuine. Such as the following; Christians strongly uphold equality, but an equality before God. It's self-evident that people are not equal in ability, in privilege, etc.; but how do we solve that? He posits fraternity, most people now posit forced equality:
"The comity of peoples in groups large or small rests not upon this chimerical notion of equality but upon fraternity, a concept which long antedates it in history because it goes immeasurably deeper in human sentiment. The ancient feeling of brotherhood carries obligations of which equality knows nothing. It calls for respect and protection, for brotherhood is status in family, and family is by nature hierarchical. It demands patience with little brother, and it may sternly exact duty of big brother. It places people in a network of sentiment, not of rights—"
Yet another thing Dick attacked effectively was a sort of presentism, or "chronological snobbery" as C. S. Lewis put it; this taking of yesterday as the status quo, not, you know, all of history:
"The mere notion of infinite progress is destructive. If the goal recedes forever, one point is no nearer it than the last. All that we can do is compare meaninglessly yesterday, today, and tomorrow. Aristotle noted that the concept of infinity makes impossible the idea of the good. If a series of things is hierarchically ordered, it is conditioned from top to bottom and so cannot be infinite. If it is infinite, it cannot be conditioned from top to bottom, and there is no higher and lower."
A la scruton, dicky has some cool stuff to say on aesthetics:
"Symbolism is a reaction against the deification of the material world, because the symbol is always a sign of things that are not compresent in time and space. The symbol by its nature transcends and thus points to the world beyond the world. So the Symbolists were reaching for the outer reality, which to the simple early Romantics was but a vague presence. They found that experience did not interpret itself, and they were driven to difficult feats of intellection and representation in their effort to convey the significant reality."
But he somehow was too kind to the poets (to be fair the modernist poets were slappin):
"And, while it is unjust to talk, as some have, of “the cult of unintelligibility” and of “poets talking to themselves,” it seems fair to say that the Symbolists put themselves under very special handicaps and limitations, which grievously widened the gap between poetry and the public."
Yeah, poetry is dead. You know who else is dead? God:
"These leaders adopted the liberal’s solution to their problem. That was to let religion go but to replace it with education, which supposedly would exercise the same efficacy. The separation of education from religion, one of the proudest achievements of modernism, is but an extension of the separation of knowledge from metaphysics. And the education thus separated can provide their kind of indoctrination. We include here, of course, the education of the classroom, for all such institutionalized instruction proceeds on the assumptions of the state. But the education which best accomplishes their purpose is the systematic indoctrination from day to day of the whole citizenry through channels of information and entertainment."
Yes, it's education which is the new God! Secular education! Instead of raising your children in the fear of God (or whatever proverbs says) we get unmoored slip-sliding into a chaotic coma of solipsism. At points he gets a little conspiracy theory-y, but is mostly correct on media. In some ways, media like social media has levelled the playing field, but it's still policed by corporations under the state's thumb, so like meh.
"And this circumstance brings up at once the question of the intention of the rulers of the press. There is much to indicate that modern publication wishes to minimize discussion. Despite many artful pretensions to the contrary, it does not want an exchange of views, save perhaps on academic matters.
...
For another, there is the stereotyping of whole phrases. These are carefully chosen not to stimulate reflection but to evoke stock responses of approbation or disapprobation. Headlines and advertising teem with them, and we seem to approach a point at which failure to make the stock response is regarded as faintly treasonable, like refusal to salute the flag.
...
If our newspaper reader were trained to look for assumptions, if he were conscious of the rhetoric in lively reporting, we might not fear this product of the printer’s art; but that would be to grant that he is educated. As the modern world is organized, the ordinary reader seems to lose means of private judgment, and the decay of conversation has about destroyed the practice of dialectic."
The unfortunate reality is that now the educated are the most partisan and the dolts in the crowd are the most suspicious and conspiracy-theory-addicted. Perhaps that's but the new opiate of the masses. He also perfectly sums me up since college:
"Jefferson observed at one time that it would be better to have newspapers and lack a government than to have a government and be without newspapers. Yet we find him in his seventieth year writing to John Adams: “I have given up newspapers in exchange for Tacitus and Thucydides, for Newton and Euclid, and I find myself much the Happier.”"
On a related note, he points out the importance of information literacy, perhaps the single most important skill today:
"One skims through a newspaper, practicing a certain art of rejection;"
Things kinda crap out when we get to the partisan conservative idea of wealth as a measurement of personal responsibility, which, in its “individual in a vacuum” approach, utterly forgets all other variables such as accidents of birth, prejudices, personal handicaps, etc. which leftists take into consideration (and often deify). It would be a perfectly valid approach IF man were in a vacuum, and if all men were really created equal in DEGREE, but we are only created equal in KIND. This sort of conservative critique pits the middle class/new-rich against the “undeserving” poor, the lazy loafers of caricaturish political cartoons. Certainly both exist, but not all poor are undeserving, and the undeserving rich are of course never even brought up, those, who through no effort of their own are born into wealthy families, into the lions’ share of privilege, into a life above us peasants, having the free choice to work or not work, to do whatever they want with little repercussions.
This part was cool, I thought as I poured my Aunt Jemima, I mean my... *squints* Pearl Milling Company syrup:
"Accordingly, one of the most common tricks of the masters of modern commerce is to buy up an honored name and then to cheapen the quality of the merchandise for which it stands. The names have been detached from the things and can be bought and sold. They were established by individuals who saw an ideal of perfection in the tasks they undertook, and they were willing to be judged by their fidelity. In this way does utility drive out the old fashioned virtue of loyalty to an ideal, which is honor."
And yeah, some more modernity bashing, yeah!:
"First of all, I would maintain that modern man is a parricide. He has taken up arms against, and he has effectually slain, what former men have regarded with filial veneration. He has not been conscious of crime but has, on the contrary—and certainly this is nothing new to students of human behavior—regarded his action as a proof of virtue."
"It has been well said that the chief trouble with the contemporary generation is that it has not read the minutes of the last meeting. Most modern people appear to resent the past and seek to deny its substance for either of two reasons: (1) it confuses them, or (2) it inhibits them. If it confuses them, they have not thought enough about it; if it inhibits them, we should look with a curious eye upon whatever schemes they have afoot. ... The spirit of modern impiety would inter their memory with their bones and hope to create a new world out of good will and ignorance."
"With her superior closeness to nature, her intuitive realism, her unfailing ability to detect the sophistry in mere intellectuality, how was she ever cozened into the mistake of going modern? Perhaps it was the decay of chivalry in men that proved too much. After the gentleman went, the lady had to go too. No longer protected, the woman now has her career, in which she makes a drab pilgrimage from two room apartment to job to divorce court."
"It is said that physicians sometimes ask patients, “Do you really wish to get well?” And, to be perfectly realistic in this matter, we must put the question of whether modern civilization wishes to survive. One can detect signs of suicidal impulse; one feels at times that the modern world is calling for madder music and for stronger wine, is craving some delirium which will take it completely away from reality. One is made to think of Kierkegaard’s figure of spectators in the theater, who applaud the announcement and repeated announcement that the building is on fire."
And in a petersonian/dostoevskian turn, we have his conclusion:
"I have tried, as far as possible, to express the thought of this essay in secular language, but there are points where it has proved impossible to dispense with appeal to religion. And I think this term must be invoked to describe the strongest sustaining power in a life which is from limited points of view “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” It can be shown in every case that loss of belief results in some form of bitterness. Ancient cynicism, skepticism, and even stoicism, which were products of the decline of Greek religion, each concealed a bitterness. There is bitterness in the thought that there may be no hell; for—in the irrefutable syllogism of the theologians—if there is no hell, there is no justice. And bitterness is always an incentive to self-destruction. When it becomes evident that the world’s rewards are not adequate to the world’s pain, and when the possibility of other reward is denied, simple calculation demands the ending of all."
So that's that. modernity sucks because materialism sucks because dostoyevsky was right and Nietzsche was right and most kids nowadays don't read either of them so they don't understand why they and everyone around them are depressed and hate their own culture even though people literally escape from other parts of the world and enter their lands illegally just to live a better life... okay enough partisan shid, I'm gonna go buy a bunch of stuff and binge reality TV (or youtube, whichever is easier).
“For four centuries every man has been not only his own priest but his own professor of ethics, and the consequence is an anarchy which threatens even that minimum consensus of value necessary to the political state.”
which was followed closely by:
“world view is the most important thing about a man”
I wholeheartedly agree, synechdiche and all. The heart of Dick's arguments are that of materialistic modernism winning over premodern traditionalism. In the direct wake of world war II, there was no postmodernism, only shock. Postmodernism came as the necessary aftertaste of such loss, and, as in real aftertastes, it takes a minute for it to hit you. As such, with the dichotomy instead of the now-familiar trichotomy, things seem like false dichotomies simply because we now see a trichotomy. I think it still generally works, as postmodernity is still usually hopelessly materialistic.
Most honest philosophers will admit that absolute materialism is absurd and philosophically untenable. Dick has a fun time poking holes in that:
“His decline can be represented as a long series of abdications. He has found less and less ground for authority at the same time he thought he was setting himself up as the center of authority in the universe; indeed, there seems to exist here a dialectic process which takes away his power in proportion as he demonstrates that his independence entitles him to power.”
For some reason he traces the decline to Nominalism and William of Ockham being kinda skeptical of platonism (ideals and forms and all that stuff). I'd trace it back to, idk, the garden of eden, or maybe babel, or maybe the papacy, or maybe luther. He only mentions babel from the preceeding list. This is a good summary of the results of nominalism, in his eyes:
“Here begins the assault upon definition: if words no longer correspond to objective realities, it seems no great wrong to take liberties with words. From this point on, faith in language as a means of arriving at truth weakens, until our own age, filled with an acute sense of doubt, looks for a remedy in the new science of semantics.”
Weaver puts his finger on a pulse I'd very much like to tap into, but he also throws in lots of garbage about jazz being a harbinger of nihilism (kinda racist prolly) and other partisan defenses of tradition and premodernism that even I, a self-admitted premodernist, wouldn't attempt. Against the then-invincible-looking face of modernity, Dick stands strong:
“The apostles of modernism usually begin their retort with catalogues of modern achievement, not realizing that here they bear witness to their immersion in particulars. We must remind them that we cannot begin to enumerate until we have defined what is to be sought or proved. It will not suffice to point out the inventions and processes of our century unless it can be shown that they are something other than a splendid efflorescence of decay. Whoever desires to praise some modern achievement should wait until he has related it to the professed aims of our civilization as rigorously as the Schoolmen related a corollary to their doctrine of the nature of God. All demonstrations lacking this are pointless.”
&
“The unexpressed assumption of empiricism is that experience will tell us what we are experiencing. In the popular arena one can tell from certain newspaper columns and radio programs that the average man has become imbued with this notion and imagines that an
industrious acquisition of particulars will render him a man of knowledge. With what pathetic trust does he recite his facts! He has been told that knowledge is power, and knowledge consists of a great many small things.”
This is simultaneously a premodern and postmodern critique of modernity, and it's extremely powerful. People nowadays know so much worthless trivia. Sure someone may know how many feet long some river is, but people don't understand what or how to value anymore. This little bit however precludes him from being a postmodernist, as he calls out the problem he had started to see and which would be fully consummated in postmodernity:
”This explains why precultural periods are characterized by formlessness and post-cultural by the clashing of forms. The darkling plain, swept by alarms, which threatens to be the world of our future, is an arena in which conflicting ideas, numerous after the accumulation of centuries, are freed from the discipline earlier imposed by ultimate conceptions. The decline is to confusion; we are agitated by sensation and look with wonder upon the serene somnambulistic creations of souls which had the metaphysical anchorage.”
He also rightfully points out how the modernity of his age was developing into postmodernity with its attack on exclusivity (something modernity didn't mind), and its attack on form per se. He goes on to elucidate something about religion which has been self-evident to me, as religion is much more than the supernatural:
“That it does not matter what a man believes is a statement heard on every side today. The statement carries a fearful implication. If a man is a philosopher in the sense with which we started, what he believes tells him what the world is for. How can men who disagree about what the world is for agree about any of the minutiae of daily conduct? The statement really means that it does not matter what a man believes so long as he does not take his beliefs seriously. Anyone can observe that this is the status to which religious belief has been reduced for many years. But suppose he does take his beliefs seriously? Then what he believes places a stamp upon his experience, and he belongs to a culture, which is a league founded on exclusive principles.”
Many times does Dick devolve into prudishness, but he is right: slippery slopes do exist, and the prudes are always proven right eventually. Consider Logan Paul's infamous forest excursion and read the following:
"The rise of sensational journalism everywhere testifies to man’s loss of points of reference, to his determination to enjoy the forbidden in the name of freedom. All reserve is being sacrificed to titillation."
Dick even echoes my thoughts on education which is too "democratic", or one could say automatic:
“For, if the proscription against every kind of distinction continues, there is no hope of integration except on the level of instinct.”
I've been trying to decide if some of his ideas/stances are just reactionary, if they are just partisan, or if they are actually original and genuine. Such as the following; Christians strongly uphold equality, but an equality before God. It's self-evident that people are not equal in ability, in privilege, etc.; but how do we solve that? He posits fraternity, most people now posit forced equality:
"The comity of peoples in groups large or small rests not upon this chimerical notion of equality but upon fraternity, a concept which long antedates it in history because it goes immeasurably deeper in human sentiment. The ancient feeling of brotherhood carries obligations of which equality knows nothing. It calls for respect and protection, for brotherhood is status in family, and family is by nature hierarchical. It demands patience with little brother, and it may sternly exact duty of big brother. It places people in a network of sentiment, not of rights—"
Yet another thing Dick attacked effectively was a sort of presentism, or "chronological snobbery" as C. S. Lewis put it; this taking of yesterday as the status quo, not, you know, all of history:
"The mere notion of infinite progress is destructive. If the goal recedes forever, one point is no nearer it than the last. All that we can do is compare meaninglessly yesterday, today, and tomorrow. Aristotle noted that the concept of infinity makes impossible the idea of the good. If a series of things is hierarchically ordered, it is conditioned from top to bottom and so cannot be infinite. If it is infinite, it cannot be conditioned from top to bottom, and there is no higher and lower."
A la scruton, dicky has some cool stuff to say on aesthetics:
"Symbolism is a reaction against the deification of the material world, because the symbol is always a sign of things that are not compresent in time and space. The symbol by its nature transcends and thus points to the world beyond the world. So the Symbolists were reaching for the outer reality, which to the simple early Romantics was but a vague presence. They found that experience did not interpret itself, and they were driven to difficult feats of intellection and representation in their effort to convey the significant reality."
But he somehow was too kind to the poets (to be fair the modernist poets were slappin):
"And, while it is unjust to talk, as some have, of “the cult of unintelligibility” and of “poets talking to themselves,” it seems fair to say that the Symbolists put themselves under very special handicaps and limitations, which grievously widened the gap between poetry and the public."
Yeah, poetry is dead. You know who else is dead? God:
"These leaders adopted the liberal’s solution to their problem. That was to let religion go but to replace it with education, which supposedly would exercise the same efficacy. The separation of education from religion, one of the proudest achievements of modernism, is but an extension of the separation of knowledge from metaphysics. And the education thus separated can provide their kind of indoctrination. We include here, of course, the education of the classroom, for all such institutionalized instruction proceeds on the assumptions of the state. But the education which best accomplishes their purpose is the systematic indoctrination from day to day of the whole citizenry through channels of information and entertainment."
Yes, it's education which is the new God! Secular education! Instead of raising your children in the fear of God (or whatever proverbs says) we get unmoored slip-sliding into a chaotic coma of solipsism. At points he gets a little conspiracy theory-y, but is mostly correct on media. In some ways, media like social media has levelled the playing field, but it's still policed by corporations under the state's thumb, so like meh.
"And this circumstance brings up at once the question of the intention of the rulers of the press. There is much to indicate that modern publication wishes to minimize discussion. Despite many artful pretensions to the contrary, it does not want an exchange of views, save perhaps on academic matters.
...
For another, there is the stereotyping of whole phrases. These are carefully chosen not to stimulate reflection but to evoke stock responses of approbation or disapprobation. Headlines and advertising teem with them, and we seem to approach a point at which failure to make the stock response is regarded as faintly treasonable, like refusal to salute the flag.
...
If our newspaper reader were trained to look for assumptions, if he were conscious of the rhetoric in lively reporting, we might not fear this product of the printer’s art; but that would be to grant that he is educated. As the modern world is organized, the ordinary reader seems to lose means of private judgment, and the decay of conversation has about destroyed the practice of dialectic."
The unfortunate reality is that now the educated are the most partisan and the dolts in the crowd are the most suspicious and conspiracy-theory-addicted. Perhaps that's but the new opiate of the masses. He also perfectly sums me up since college:
"Jefferson observed at one time that it would be better to have newspapers and lack a government than to have a government and be without newspapers. Yet we find him in his seventieth year writing to John Adams: “I have given up newspapers in exchange for Tacitus and Thucydides, for Newton and Euclid, and I find myself much the Happier.”"
On a related note, he points out the importance of information literacy, perhaps the single most important skill today:
"One skims through a newspaper, practicing a certain art of rejection;"
Things kinda crap out when we get to the partisan conservative idea of wealth as a measurement of personal responsibility, which, in its “individual in a vacuum” approach, utterly forgets all other variables such as accidents of birth, prejudices, personal handicaps, etc. which leftists take into consideration (and often deify). It would be a perfectly valid approach IF man were in a vacuum, and if all men were really created equal in DEGREE, but we are only created equal in KIND. This sort of conservative critique pits the middle class/new-rich against the “undeserving” poor, the lazy loafers of caricaturish political cartoons. Certainly both exist, but not all poor are undeserving, and the undeserving rich are of course never even brought up, those, who through no effort of their own are born into wealthy families, into the lions’ share of privilege, into a life above us peasants, having the free choice to work or not work, to do whatever they want with little repercussions.
This part was cool, I thought as I poured my Aunt Jemima, I mean my... *squints* Pearl Milling Company syrup:
"Accordingly, one of the most common tricks of the masters of modern commerce is to buy up an honored name and then to cheapen the quality of the merchandise for which it stands. The names have been detached from the things and can be bought and sold. They were established by individuals who saw an ideal of perfection in the tasks they undertook, and they were willing to be judged by their fidelity. In this way does utility drive out the old fashioned virtue of loyalty to an ideal, which is honor."
And yeah, some more modernity bashing, yeah!:
"First of all, I would maintain that modern man is a parricide. He has taken up arms against, and he has effectually slain, what former men have regarded with filial veneration. He has not been conscious of crime but has, on the contrary—and certainly this is nothing new to students of human behavior—regarded his action as a proof of virtue."
"It has been well said that the chief trouble with the contemporary generation is that it has not read the minutes of the last meeting. Most modern people appear to resent the past and seek to deny its substance for either of two reasons: (1) it confuses them, or (2) it inhibits them. If it confuses them, they have not thought enough about it; if it inhibits them, we should look with a curious eye upon whatever schemes they have afoot. ... The spirit of modern impiety would inter their memory with their bones and hope to create a new world out of good will and ignorance."
"With her superior closeness to nature, her intuitive realism, her unfailing ability to detect the sophistry in mere intellectuality, how was she ever cozened into the mistake of going modern? Perhaps it was the decay of chivalry in men that proved too much. After the gentleman went, the lady had to go too. No longer protected, the woman now has her career, in which she makes a drab pilgrimage from two room apartment to job to divorce court."
"It is said that physicians sometimes ask patients, “Do you really wish to get well?” And, to be perfectly realistic in this matter, we must put the question of whether modern civilization wishes to survive. One can detect signs of suicidal impulse; one feels at times that the modern world is calling for madder music and for stronger wine, is craving some delirium which will take it completely away from reality. One is made to think of Kierkegaard’s figure of spectators in the theater, who applaud the announcement and repeated announcement that the building is on fire."
And in a petersonian/dostoevskian turn, we have his conclusion:
"I have tried, as far as possible, to express the thought of this essay in secular language, but there are points where it has proved impossible to dispense with appeal to religion. And I think this term must be invoked to describe the strongest sustaining power in a life which is from limited points of view “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” It can be shown in every case that loss of belief results in some form of bitterness. Ancient cynicism, skepticism, and even stoicism, which were products of the decline of Greek religion, each concealed a bitterness. There is bitterness in the thought that there may be no hell; for—in the irrefutable syllogism of the theologians—if there is no hell, there is no justice. And bitterness is always an incentive to self-destruction. When it becomes evident that the world’s rewards are not adequate to the world’s pain, and when the possibility of other reward is denied, simple calculation demands the ending of all."
So that's that. modernity sucks because materialism sucks because dostoyevsky was right and Nietzsche was right and most kids nowadays don't read either of them so they don't understand why they and everyone around them are depressed and hate their own culture even though people literally escape from other parts of the world and enter their lands illegally just to live a better life... okay enough partisan shid, I'm gonna go buy a bunch of stuff and binge reality TV (or youtube, whichever is easier).
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